Gainward GeForce GTX 1630 Ghost

[80-watt Hamster]

EVGA is listing this card for 199$ and the 1650 is selling for 179 with rebate lol.

Something... not-good is happening at EVGA behind the scenes, I feel. B-stock used to track pretty closely with used prices, but they've REALLY de-coupled over the past several months. Now they want one to fork over an extra fifty for the privilege of buying the EVGA version of something that's not worth the $150 it's "supposed" to be? I am disappoint.

 

[AusWolf]

Gamers: "the 6400 is the worst graphics card of the decade"

Nvidia: "hold my beer"

 

[sLowEnd]

It's a shame about the price. It's priced way too close to the GTX 1650.

 

[GoldenX]

Man NVENC is expensive.
Remember when I said the 6500 was setting an awful precedent for the low end market?

 

[Lew Zealand]

The 6400 has at least a few things going for it:

<50W for real weak PSUs
True single slot low profile card

So it can click in anywhere there's a PCIe slot, even an 8 year old i5 SFF office PC. And it'll still be wayyy faster than the 1630 which can't even fit in the majority of these.

The problem is that the 6400 should be $99, maybe $129 for the fit-anywhere convenience. So the 1630 should be $69-89, right where the 1030 was. These products can be OK, but only at the right price.

 

[catulitechup]

Gamers: "the 6400 is the worst graphics card of the decade"

Nvidia: "no gtx 1630 is the worst gpu in 2022"

Intel: "arc a310 hold my beer"

 

[WeeRab]

And they said the RX6500 was dog.......

 

[InVasMani]

Why is Nvidia launching a GPU with this level of performance getting trounced by AMD RX6400 with it's x4 PCIE link bus width with a x16 PCIE bus width it can't even leverage!!? They've got a far greater R&D budget and this is what decide to launch? Are they overcompensating for their next GPU's launch and the atrocious power draw expected?

 

[ModEl4]

The 6400 has at least a few things going for it:

<50W for real weak PSUs
True single slot low profile card

So it can click in anywhere there's a PCIe slot, even an 8 year old i5 SFF office PC. And it'll still be wayyy faster than the 1630 which can't even fit in the majority of these.

To tell you the truth, i don't even remember Nvidia having a single slot low profile competitor that launched the last 5 years except GP108 based ones at 30W or less, so RX6400 has no competition essentially for what it offers performance-wise.
But at 53W TBP it wouldn't be a good experience for gaming in a SFF chassis (for decoding it's another matter) a friend of mine had back in the day a HP 8200 Elite i5 2400 SFF and he tried a low profile GTX 1050Ti (dual slot) and it had some heat problems if i remember

 

[Lew Zealand]

To tell you the truth, i don't even remember Nvidia having a single slot low profile competitor that launched the last 5 years except GP108 based ones at 30W or less, so RX6400 has no competition essentially for what it offers performance-wise.
But at 53W TBP it wouldn't be a good experience for gaming in a SFF chassis (for decoding it's another matter) a friend of mine had back in the day a HP 8200 Elite i5 2400 SFF and he tried a low profile GTX 1050Ti (dual slot) and it had some heat problems if i remember

I can give you an update to that in a week if you'd like. I have a pile of SFF Optiplex 9020s back @work (I'm offsite this week) and hopefully one of 'em has an i7 in it but I'll take the i5 if that's what I get.

Oh yeah, and a 6400. Also a 1050Ti slot-power only, but that's full height and been in the MT Optiplex 9020 I'm testing with now with the 6400, which even at PCIe 3 is better than expected. I expected notably worse than the 1050Ti but that hasn't been the case at all. Generally 20% faster at playable settings (1080p ultra need not apply). Still early days with it though and I have the Sapphire 6400, which has a better cooler, though still in that tiny form factor. It gets to 72C in the Dell MT at continuous 100% load but just because that case has space inside doesn't mean it has decent airflow. Can't wait until next week to see how the SFF setup goes.

 

[Jism]

I cant wait for what Intel Arc brings to the table, lol.

 

[InVasMani]

The bar is low enough that even Intel can beat it at graphics.

 

[Shatun_Bear]

This should be 25 quid.

 

[efikkan]

Why is Nvidia launching a GPU with this level of performance getting trounced by AMD RX6400 with it's x4 PCIE link bus width with a x16 PCIE bus width it can't even leverage!!? They've got a far greater R&D budget and this is what decide to launch? Are they overcompensating for their next GPU's launch and the atrocious power draw expected?

You, like so many others in here see this product through the view of a gamer. Well, there are many non-gamers who needs GPUs too. There are many PC owners who want to upgrade a fully working desktop with better display outputs, more displays or newer codecs. Or they just want a smooth desktop experience. Or a non-gaming HTPC build. Products like this are perfect for that, as long as they are not intended for gaming.

My only objection here is the price. A MSRP of $99 would be much better.

 

[Lew Zealand]

@W1zzard

Could you please explain this? What's wrong with GTX 1660 Super and RTX 2060 both of which have 6GB of VRAM which is exactly the same as RX 5600 XT? GTX 1060 is suddenly 4 times faster than GTX 1660? Um, what?

You could almost argue an AMD vs Nvidia driver bug/thing, except the 1060 seems fine here. Inconsequential as it's 4K but still an odd occurrence.

???

 

[Chrispy_]

not sure where you got those "official" specs from.

nor does it account for the tolerances allowed . . just saying.

I got mine from the ATX spec, TBH the first result Google returned was ATX 2.2 and I didn't spend long hunting, I just hit CTRL+F

I think the tiny discrepancy is the height of the slot a card sits in. The PCI slot is physically taller than a PCIe slot, I guess the card sits prouder from the motherboard PCB by a few mm as a result. The spec remains unchanged and consistent either way - the top edge of the bracket is the max height according to the ATX, and by proxy also the PCI, PCIe, and AGP standards - all of which are valid cards for use in an ATX expansion slot.

Going back a few years, the reference/standard cards were all close to identical in height which seemed to be about 2mm taller than the slot cover, possibly they manufactured them as big as they were allowed to by the OEMs they were making them for, and the extra couple of mm over the spec covers the heads of the screws on the slot covers or something. It can't be coincidence that they're all practically identical over the course of the last 15 years, +/- 2mm or so...

Nvidia:

ATI/AMD:

It's also worth noting that for many of the reference cards pictured above, the power connectors were on the short edge of the card to prevent the cables violating the height restriction. This is something that's only changed in the last 5 years or so, and only on some cards. Ampere and RDNA2 are the first generation from both companies where the reference/founders models have just completely given up on trying to adhere to the ATX size specification. Both the 6900 and 3090 are so completely over spec that they're not even pretending to be close.

 

[RedBear]

Thanks for the review and congratulations for being the first to review this, let's euphemistically call it "weird", GPU.

Why is Nvidia launching a GPU with this level of performance getting trounced by AMD RX6400 with it's x4 PCIE link bus width with a x16 PCIE bus width it can't even leverage!!? They've got a far greater R&D budget and this is what decide to launch? Are they overcompensating for their next GPU's launch and the atrocious power draw expected?

IMO it's simply because this GPU was designed before the recent collapse of the cryptomining market and the consequent fall of GPU prices (so much for all the poor souls who said that it wasn't because of cryptos that we couldn't find a GPU at MSRP), even if it's worse than the RX 6400 it still might have been somewhat viable at $150 in 2021, in part because of Nvidia's brand; it's pure nonsense now, but it was nearly ready for release at this point.

 

[AusWolf]

Intel: "arc a310 hold my beer"

At least there's competition not just for the position of the best graphics card on the market, but also for the worst one.

 

[ModEl4]

I can give you an update to that in a week if you'd like. I have a pile of SFF Optiplex 9020s back @work (I'm offsite this week) and hopefully one of 'em has an i7 in it but I'll take the i5 if that's what I get.

Oh yeah, and a 6400. Also a 1050Ti slot-power only, but that's full height and been in the MT Optiplex 9020 I'm testing with now with the 6400, which even at PCIe 3 is better than expected. I expected notably worse than the 1050Ti but that hasn't been the case at all. Generally 20% faster at playable settings (1080p ultra need not apply). Still early days with it though and I have the Sapphire 6400, which has a better cooler, though still in that tiny form factor. It gets to 72C in the Dell MT at continuous 100% load but just because that case has space inside doesn't mean it has decent airflow. Can't wait until next week to see how the SFF setup goes.

It would be interesting for people that want to upgrade an old commercial SFF PC (Although 9020 was Dell's flagship chassis, above 7020/3020, and they had also DT versions between MT & SFF models (but not for 9020 series if i remember), so depending the model, the results may be not applicable in every SFF case, still very useful)

 

[AusWolf]

To tell you the truth, i don't even remember Nvidia having a single slot low profile competitor that launched the last 5 years except GP108 based ones at 30W or less, so RX6400 has no competition essentially for what it offers performance-wise.
But at 53W TBP it wouldn't be a good experience for gaming in a SFF chassis (for decoding it's another matter) a friend of mine had back in the day a HP 8200 Elite i5 2400 SFF and he tried a low profile GTX 1050Ti (dual slot) and it had some heat problems if i remember

I have a low profile 6400 in my HTPC, and I can confirm, it's doing okay. Sure, it hearts up to 70+ °C if I fire up a game, but who cares? The case actually has an 8 cm fan slot right under it. If I put a fan there, the card never exceeds 65 °C. Decoding is also fine, as it can do all formats except for AV-1.

 

[ModEl4]

I have a low profile 6400 in my HTPC, and I can confirm, it's doing okay. Sure, it hearts up to 70+ °C if I fire up a game, but who cares? The case actually has an 8 cm fan slot right under it. If I put a fan there, the card never exceeds 65 °C. Decoding is also fine, as it can do all formats except for AV-1.

Excellent!
What's the chassis/case?

 

[looniam]

I got mine from the ATX spec, {SNIP}

huh. i posted the ATX* spec, so . . . i don't think you did.

actually PCI-SIG since atx covers PSUs not add in cards. (section 9 in attached)

 

[AusWolf]

Excellent!
What's the chassis/case?

It's an AeroCool CS-101.

Oh, and I keep it on the bottom shelf of an open cabinet, so it doesn't even enjoy completely unrestricted airflow.

 

[Udyr]

To tell you the truth, i don't even remember Nvidia having a single slot low profile competitor that launched the last 5 years except GP108 based ones at 30W or less, so RX6400 has no competition essentially for what it offers performance-wise.

PNY's got your back, homie.

PNY GeForce® GTX 1650 XLR8 Gaming Overclocked Edition

The GeForce GTX 1650 is built with the breakthrough graphics performance of the award-winning NVIDIA Turing™ architecture. With up to 2X the performance of the GeForce GTX 950, it’s a supercharger for today’s most popular games, and even faster with modern titles.

www.pny.com

 

[AusWolf]

PNY's got your back, homie.

PNY GeForce® GTX 1650 XLR8 Gaming Overclocked Edition

The GeForce GTX 1650 is built with the breakthrough graphics performance of the award-winning NVIDIA Turing™ architecture. With up to 2X the performance of the GeForce GTX 950, it’s a supercharger for today’s most popular games, and even faster with modern titles.

www.pny.com

That's not low profile.