Nvidia"s GeForce GT 730 cards are selling at great prices today. These GPUs quite capable of some light 720p gaming or as a HTPC driver as long as you aren"t looking for support for the newer video codecs like AV1.
There are three variants of the GT 730 currently on deal from three separate AIBs: Asus, Gigabyte and MSI. The cheapest of the bunch is the MSI GeForce GT 730 at just $54.57 on Newegg US.
However, this particular 730 model is not based on the new Kepler architecture, and is instead based on Fermi. As a result, you get much lower efficiency on this thing as the card is clocked at around 200MHz lower than Kepler counterparts while also consuming almost 30% more power at 49W.
That"s not even the worst part as the Fermi GT 730 only has 96 CUDA Cores compared to 384 on the Kepler models we talk about later, meaning the card can not game much, if at all, outside of extremely old titles like Counter Strike 1.6. Also, can it run Crysis? Probably not.
Still if you are really tight on budget and can spend only around $50-55, you can look at this, but we recommend considering spending some extra and considering the other ones we talk about later.
There is only one positive side to this MSI GT 730 model. The card is slow which means it won"t be held back by the bandwidth provided by the GDDR3 VRAM.
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MSI GT 730 2GB GDDR3 (Fermi): $54.57 (Newegg US)
Moving on, we have the Asus GT 730 2GB GDDR5 model selling at just $64.07. Although the card is passively cooled with no fans, the Asus GT 730 GDDR5 is based on the newer, more efficient, Kepler architecture. As such, the card comes with 384 CUDA Cores that are also clocked faster than the previous MSI model at 902MHz. It also carries a much lower TDP of just 38W. And most importantly, this is one of the rarer GT 730 variants that packs GDDR5 memory.
Additionally, a passively cooled GPU means it can be a silent HTPC card too, alongside being a decent gamer. Get the Asus GT 730 at the link below:
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Asus GT 730 2GB GDDR5 (Kepler): $64.07 (Newegg US)
The Asus GT 730 2GB GDDR5 is probably the best deal of the bunch, though if your case has very poor airflow, then you can consider the next Gigabyte model.
The Gigabyte 2GB GT 730 is mostly the same as the previous Asus variant. However, the card is actively cooled with an axial fan on top and the card packs GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR5 on the Asus. As a result, the performance can take a very big hit despite both having 2GB of video memory.
However, like we stated above, the Gigabyte GT 730 is a good choice if your case doesn"t have good enough airflow where the active cooling on the card can help.
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Gigabyte GT 730 2GB GDDR3 (Kepler): $65.79 (Newegg)
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