Monday, January 20th 2025
MAXSUN Dips Back into NVIDIA GT 730 GPU Pool
Recent MAXSUN activities have been very Intel Arc "Battlemage" B-series GPU-focused—most notably, a leaked design that leverages dual M.2 slots. Earlier today, ITHome reported on the fresh retail release of two sort-of-new MAXSUN graphics cards in China (on JD.com)—MS-GT730 PH 4 GB (¥359/~US$49) and MS-GT730 PH 2 GB (¥329/~US$45). These super low budget offerings signal a dip back into technologies of old: NVIDIA's GK208 "Kepler 2.0" GPU—of 2014 vintage. This is a curious choice, given that Team Green's "Kepler" GPU generation has not received new drivers since the release of R470 (back in 2021), and the last security update arrived with NVIDIA's 473.47 WHQL driver.
ITHome reckons that MAXSUN has simply recycled its existing MS-GT730 Heavy Hammer 4G and MS-GT730 Heavy Hammer 2G card designs for an early 2025 market launch—TechPowerUp's GPU database produces another very similar looking model: the GT 730 Transformers III 2G. The online publication reached out to MAXSUN's JD storefront customer service for comment on the apparent refresh of old products. ITHome discovered that the renamed reissues are a result of demands generated by "internal supply chain management." MAXSUN stated that its production batch have changed, and it: "emphasizes that the performance (of their new models) is consistent with the old version(s)."
Sources:
ITHome, Tom's Hardware
ITHome reckons that MAXSUN has simply recycled its existing MS-GT730 Heavy Hammer 4G and MS-GT730 Heavy Hammer 2G card designs for an early 2025 market launch—TechPowerUp's GPU database produces another very similar looking model: the GT 730 Transformers III 2G. The online publication reached out to MAXSUN's JD storefront customer service for comment on the apparent refresh of old products. ITHome discovered that the renamed reissues are a result of demands generated by "internal supply chain management." MAXSUN stated that its production batch have changed, and it: "emphasizes that the performance (of their new models) is consistent with the old version(s)."
40 Comments on MAXSUN Dips Back into NVIDIA GT 730 GPU Pool
www.amazon.ca/GeForce-Profile-Graphics-Silent-Brackets/dp/B09GP8989B
I'd have thought there were plenty enough in the wild by now but they're either still finding new, or are recycling, the GPU's...
Like a 6500 XT and Team Group 3200mts ram for 89 bucks on newegg.
A gt 730 isn't worth 50$. I feel bad if someone gets suckered into buying that trash.
I mean, a ~11yr old low-end card which gets totally beaten by modern iGPUs.I guess they got mad when these were used as a base for fake cards; better sell the rest of them as legit ones. :laugh:
And for the GT 730, even GTA V performance, probably will stink!
Depending on how much the VRAM and/or bus is affecting it, for all I know, the common variant of GT 730, possibly don't perform better than a GeForce 9500 GT! (Those get decimated by a GeForce 9600 GT!)
In that case, you will be lucky to enjoy some 768p games from 2004 or around there!
OTOH, if they perform like GeForce GT 640s, then that's at least light years better than a GeForce 9500 GT. That was the case with an eVGA model that I got in the mid-2010s.
A decade from now people will still be here asking which GT730 is the best and where can they find an RX 570 BIOS.
Slot powered, look for rx 6400 for 50 bucks.
Perhaps the gt 730 will sell well in China. I can't see this making sense for US residents.
But really I see it's biggest strength is for XP gaming as it's fully supported and performs well against some era greats, and has a lot of versatility in the form factor / no external power for all manner of prebuilts and ex corporate boxes that are Haswell or older that you can build a sick XP machine from. A couple of Quadro's are even better if you can get hands on, but could be more pricey and require (very simple) driver modding to work.
For anyone interested, here's a quick indication of the GT730 relative to some era cards, and some other similar if not more costly options.
Hell, even get an used 660 over this ancient "new" card. :D
Good point for XP though!
What it might boil down to is what kind of games you want to throw at it. My 3Dmark numbers are entirely just to demonstrate the relative performance against some higher end options over the years that are suited to XP rigs, so for such a cheap/available card the 730 can basically crush DX9 gaming, even the DDR3 version is almost excessively performant for 125 of 130 games on my XP rig.
Windows 7 and beyond rigs IMO would necessitate faster / newer cards, DX10/11 titles as well as typically starting to look at higher 16:9 resolutions rather than lower 4:3 ones.