NVIDIA's GeForce GT 430: The Next HTPC King?
by Ryan Smith & Ganesh T S on October 11, 2010 9:00 AM ESTFor the purpose of HTPC reviews (in particular, HQV benchmarking for discrete GPUs), we have set up a dedicated testbed with the following configuration. Considering that we will soon be having Sandy Bridge HTPCs, we have specifically tagged this as the Fall 2010 HTPC testbed.
| Fall 2010 HTPC Benchmarking Testbed Setup | |
| Processor | Intel i5-680 CPU - 3.60GHz, 4MB Cache |
| Motherboard | Asus P7H55D-M EVO |
| OS Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB |
| Secondary Drive | Kingston SSDNow 128GB |
| Memory | G.SKILL ECO Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) F3-10666CL7D-4GBECO CAS 7-7-7-21 |
| Video Cards | Various |
| Optical Drives | ASUS 8X Blu-ray Drive Model BC-08B1ST |
| Case | Antec VERIS Fusion Remote Max |
| Power Supply | Antec TruePower New TP-550 550W |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Ultimate x64 |
| . | |
All the above components were chosen keeping extensibility in mind. The Clarkdale CPU allows us to test the Intel HD Graphics, and the PCI-E 2.0 x 16 slot can take in any HTPC oriented graphics card from ATI or nVidia. We got the fastest dual core Clarkdale processor and paired it with one of the well-reviewed LGA1156 motherboards from Asus. With USB 3.0 and eSATA support, transferring information to and from our SFF HTPCs such as the ASRock Vision 3D and Core 100 was a cinch. Keeping hard drive duties is the Seagate Barracuda XT, which strikes a fine balance between speed, power consumption and quietness. A SSD drive from Kingston was thrown in to enable us to use for some benchmarking programs we will cover in some future articles.
The G-Skill ECO series DDR3 modules fit in perfectly with the rest of the testbed. Low voltage requirements ensured that the DIMMs never heated up despite being fast and responsive. Asus was also kind enough to provide a Blu-Ray drive (internal module) which we used to play the HQV BR disc / test bitstreaming. A big chassis from Antec was chosen despite the testbed motherboard being micro-ATX. This was done in order to accommodate ATX motherboards in the future, if made necessary. The 550W Antec power supply also ensures that we can evaluate cards requiring external power connectors for HTPC purposes.
Each hardware configuration has an associated OS image which was created / restored as necessary using Clonezilla. This ensures that we do not end up with conflicting drivers while evaluating GPUs from different companies on the same base testbed. Our first evaluation using the above testbed setup was HQV benchmarking for the GT 430 and Radeon HD 5570. Read on for the results from our exercise.
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duploxxx - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
makes you wonder how good your IT qualities are.... had tons of ati and nvidia cards, never had issues with ati or nvidia. Sure both of them have had a few glitches but that is more due to MS and the drivers.btw it's often due to crappy OEM implementation of the vendor driver, ever thought of that????
dnd728 - Friday, October 15, 2010 - link
Another Einstein...Fallen Kell - Tuesday, October 12, 2010 - link
I bought a passive AMD 5750 which I use in my HTPC, mainly to gain Blu-Ray audio bitstreaming. I have to say, AMD still has a lot of work they need to do in terms of their drivers. As much as I love the capabilities of this card, I spent 5 days getting it to work properly and output the bitstreamed audio. I think that is probably a large reason why their market share hasn't grown. It should have just worked after I installed the latest drivers. But no, I had to download a specific version (not the latest), had to also download audio drivers from ANOTHER company entirely (not AMD), get a specific version of those drivers (not the latest), install them in the proper order (i.e. install the third party drivers after I installed AMD's drivers).... It was hoop after hoop after hoop.... A normal consumer would have simply taken the card back as "broken".khimera2000 - Thursday, October 14, 2010 - link
I had to change the default audio after the ATI drivers installed... it took me two minuts to get it working ;Dtherealnickdanger - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
If image quality is so important, you wouldn't watch anything but 1080p24 Blu-Ray in the first place! :)But seriously, in the days of DVD, HQV tests were of higher importance because DVD was 480i, when the movies and television shows were typically sourced on film @ 24 fps. With Blu-Ray, you get to watch TV and film in the native cadence with no deinterlacing, and you certainly don't want resoution scaling or conversion of any kind. Any attempt to artificially smooth or sharpen the image would adversely affect image quality.
The most important feature to home theater enthusiasts is the purest representation of the original source, without enchancements or filters.
ganeshts - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
I am sure there are plenty of HTPC users who shoot using camcorders like the Flip or the Playsport. Not all of those videos are in 60fps. 30 fps videos need to be 2:2 pulled-down. Cadence detection helps a lot here.In addition, Blu-Ray also allows 1080i videos. Of course, if you have a video processor, source direct is best. However, a good HTPC is supposed to make a video processor redundant.
We have mentioned in the review that power users can always work around the unimplemented features by doing a 'source direct' playback.
Stonedofmoo - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
For me the only reason I was holding out for this card was to see how effective it would be as a dedicated PhysX card to use in conjunction with my GTX460 1Gb.The GTS450 seems rather overkill for just that task so I was hoping the GT430 would be the ideal cheap option..
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
To be honest it's not something I had a chance to test. I've only had the card since Friday afternoon, so there wasn't much room for extras. I'll see if I can squeeze it in today.Stonedofmoo - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
No worries, it would be interesting to see if it's any use for a dedicated PhysX card.Thanks for the review :-)
Snoopy_69__ - Monday, October 11, 2010 - link
Unless someone makes a fanless GT430