ASUS ENGT430 1GB DDR3 Video Card

A Closer Look

The ASUS ENGT430, like the other 430 based cards, come with the Geforce GT 430 (a.k.a. the GF108Fermi chip) that has 96 CUDA cores and a total of 16 texture units. 

The memory subsystem of the GeForce GT 430 consists of two 64-bit memory controllers (128-bit) with 1024MB of DDR3 memory (not GDDR memory). The graphics core clock is set at 700MHz, while the CUDA Cores run at 1400MHz. The DDR3 memory speed is at 1800MHz. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 includes one GPC with two Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), two frame buffer partitions (FBs), and one half ROP partition (four ROP units).

The GeForce GT 430 also supports the core NVIDIA technologies which include: CUDA, PhysX, and 3D Vision (for photos, videos, Web streaming, and Blu-ray 3D).

What we are looking at here is a quick comparison between the NVIDIA reference card and the card made by ASUS. We can see that ASUS took the liberty of changing a few things from the reference card such as the color of the PCB, fan design, VGA connection to the board and some other upgrades to the components that improve the card. This is a normal trait for ASUS as they always want to ensure that what they create and deliver is superior to all.

Taking a look down onto the card we can see that the heat sink with a single low dba fan takes up a rather lager portion of the graphic card. This is to ensure that the GF108 GPU and other items stay nice a cool. And by the way, yes that is a ribbon cable you see on the card.

Looking from the rear end of the card (clearly not the always the best angle for many) we can see that the aluminum heat sink is huge and thick. At 3.5 inches long and .75 of an inch think this is rather massive cooler for a lower end card but the design behind it and the fan really tell the story of why. You see the fan is special design from ASUS to help keep the dust out and the heat sink is also designed to remove the maximum amount of heat with as little noise as possible. Even though the cooler looks larger it can still within a single slot configuration.