Here Come Nvidia GT 1030 Cards, For The Basics; EVGA Outs Three

And then there were the GT 1030 cards.

Nvidia’s Pascal Technology slowly took over the company’s product stack over the last year. Nvidia started from the top with its Tesla-class high-performance compute enterprise GPUs, and Pascal-based GPUs trickled down the performance lineup to lower-end gaming cards throughout the year. Now, Nvidia is introducing Pascal to your everyday workstation PC with the GeForce GT 1030.

Nvidia didn’t make a big deal about the release of the GeForce GT 1030. In fact, you won’t find any information about the workstation-class GPU on the GeForce website. EVGA isn’t ignoring the ultra-budget oriented GeForce GT 1030, though; the company announced three graphics cards based on the new GPU.

All three EVGA GeForce GT 1030 cards offer the same clock speed and memory configurations. EVGA set the core clock of its GT 1030 cards at 1,290MHz and the boost clock at 1,544MHz. Each card includes 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6,000MHz.

The primary differences between the three cards are the cooling solutions and form factors. The EVGA GeForce GT 1030 SC Single Slot features a heatsink and fan assembly that fits in a single full height slot. If you need a low-profile card, EVGA offers the GeForce GT 1030 Low Profile with a 1.5-slot heatsink and fan assembly, or the GeForce GT 1030 Passive Low Profile that includes a 1.5-slot wide heatsink without a fan. 

The GeForce GT 1030 isn’t meant for gaming, although it should ably handle games at lower settings and low resolutions, and the card is supported by Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software. The GeForce GT 1030 is really meant for accelerating everyday productivity tasks. EVGA said that its GT 1030 cards handle HD video editing and photo editing tasks twice as fast as the integrated graphics found in Intel’s 6th Generation (Skylake) Core i5 processors.

EVGA’s GeForce GT 1030 SC Low Profile is available now for $80. The other two models are “coming soon.”

Swipe to scroll horizontally
Header Cell - Column 0 Part NumberMemoryCard Height / SlotDisplay OutputCooling
EVGA GeForce GT 1030 SC Single Slot02G-P4-6338-KR2GBFull Height / Single SlotDVI-D + DVI-DHeatsink + Fan
EVGA GeForce GT 1030 SC Low Profile02G-P4-6333-KR2GBLow Profile / 1.5 SlotsHDMI + DVI-DHeatsink + Fan
EVGA GeForce GT 1030 SC Passive Low Profile02G-P4-6332-KR2GBLow Profile / 1.5 SlotsHDMI + DVI-DHeatsink

 Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years. 

  • TechyInAZ
    Nice to see the GT 1030 finally make it. If it supports HDMI 2.0b it would be great for 4k 60fps playback on TVs.
    Reply
  • turkey3_scratch
    Those are the second nicest looking GPUs! The first have to be the EVGA GT 710s.
    Reply
  • kcarbotte
    19699622 said:
    Nice to see the GT 1030 finally make it. If it supports HDMI 2.0b it would be great for 4k 60fps playback on TVs.

    that's a great point.
    good media center card if you don't want to do any gaming, just watch video files.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I'm glad these don't use GDDR3, at least. I sure hope those days are behind us.

    Just last year, my employer replaced my Dell workstation with a new model featuring a Nvidia Quadro card with GDDR3. WHY?!?
    Reply
  • Joseph_206
    Finally. I hate Intel GPU drivers. Performance-wise, they should be pretty decent. However, I've run into too many situations where the GPU drivers just didn't cooperate, or I hit some edge case. Also, some high-end CPUs don't have an integrated GPU, plus nVidia tends to perform the best in Linux. Also, I do like that AMD has been stepping up in this area as well.
    Reply
  • falchard
    So... Is this targeted at future ARM customers? Don't see much point going this low end over using the IGP.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    19700188 said:
    So... Is this targeted at future ARM customers? Don't see much point going this low end over using the IGP.
    In the workstation I mentioned above, the CPU is an E5-series Xeon. Since those lack integrated graphics, a separate graphics card was required. They gave me entry-level, because I couldn't justify anything better. Of course, it's twice as expensive because it's Quadro-branded and that's what Dell offers in their workstations, because it's a "workstation" card (even though GDDR3).

    Oh, and all cell phone SoCs have GPUs, as you'll no doubt know. Qualcomm makes the Adreno GPUs, Apple licenses Imagination's PowerVR GPUs (not for much longer), and ARM licenses the Mali GPUs. They all have fairly modern feature sets. I'd imagine the top-end models could hold their own against Intels' iGPUs. Also, there a Chinese mobile GPU maker, called Vivante.

    Also, Raspberry Pi is ARM-based, and uses Broadcom's VC4 GPU. That's quite dated, but at least the software stack (and firmware) is fully open source.

    So, no reason to think ARM-based desktops are any more likely to use these than Intel boxes.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    19699622 said:
    Nice to see the GT 1030 finally make it. If it supports HDMI 2.0b it would be great for 4k 60fps playback on TVs.

    Apparently the Zotac cards do.
    Reply
  • TechyInAZ
    19700280 said:
    19699622 said:
    Nice to see the GT 1030 finally make it. If it supports HDMI 2.0b it would be great for 4k 60fps playback on TVs.

    Apparently the Zotac cards do.

    Glad to hear. My GTX 750 Ti in my HTPC can't do 60fps 4k playback thru HDMI, so I've been debating whether I should get a new card or not, but now that the GT 1030 is out, that might be a solid choice.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    19700289 said:
    19700280 said:
    19699622 said:
    Nice to see the GT 1030 finally make it. If it supports HDMI 2.0b it would be great for 4k 60fps playback on TVs.

    Apparently the Zotac cards do.

    Glad to hear. My GTX 750 Ti in my HTPC can't do 60fps 4k playback thru HDMI, so I've been debating whether I should get a new card or not, but now that the GT 1030 is out, that might be a solid choice.

    Also Zotac apparently has low profile cards too if that is a concern: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/zotac-low-profile-gt-1030-graphics-card,34433.html

    Reply