Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GT 1030 OC 2G Graphics Card

I am at a time in my life when I have more work than time most days and that doesn't leave a lot of time for gaming. That being said, I do use 3D applications like Blender in my work and occasionally I will sit down for a short gaming session. The computer I have came with Integrated Intel UHD Graphics which is not bad for basic tasks but would fall short on things like rendering graphics, modern games, etc.I picked up this card because it seemed like a reasonable trade-off between price point and performance. My Blender projects render well with this card, but I am doing small scene renders not making a movie or anything like that. I have played a couple of games, Arma, 7 Days to Die, etc and the games played smoothly with no noticeable lag.The card was easy to install and neither Windows 10 or Linux (Mint and Manjaro) have had any issues recognizing the card and installing the correct driver. The card is running at a comfortable 35° C right now even though I have a bunch of programs running as well as my browser.

I received my GT 1030 OC from Amazon Warehouse Deals (AWD) today and promptly installed it in my 11 year old HP Pavilion Elite M9200t [Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9450 @ 2.66 GHz 2.67 Ghz, 8GB RAM, Win10 64 bit, PCIe 2.0}...piece of cake, and backward compatible with PCIe 2.0.As other reviewers suggested, I didn't bother with the enclosed CD-I went to the Gigabyte website to install the latest drivers & the Aorus Engine, mainly to monitor the temperature due to past video card overheating experience (no gaming).I'm replacing a seven year old EVGA GT 520 card that's been recently having a problem with the fan- it stops turning at inappropriate times and overheats (I used canned air & a vacuum a few times in the last two months to get out any dust particles that might be unseen, which helps for awhile ).Last week, I tried an open-box Gigabyte GT 1030 silent low-profile (from AWD), but within minutes, it seemed to be running quite hot, despite multiple fans in my PC, so much so that it did sudden re-boots of my PC several times. It also had such a tall heatsink that it was smashing the firewire plug on my motherboard. Not sure if that had anything to do with the hot temp & multiple re-boots. I had to send it back. My power supply is a 385W that isn't maxed out so it's not that.This GT 1030 SC isn't as tall as the fan-less GT 1030, so it's well below the firewire plug and has been running fine without any re-booting issues. The temp has stayed around 37°(C) with standard PC use (no gaming, just watching videos, web surfing, MS Office, etc).So far, this card seems like the perfect replacement for an old PC like mine or newer machine.NOT reflected in my review rating is that I went with AWD to save a few dollars over a new item. I'm not opposed to an open-box product if it works as it should. I'll admit, I was initially concerned about the condition of the card when I saw the box's condition, but the card seems to function fine. AWD's description of the item was accurate. Everything is running great! :o)UPDATE April 25, 2019: Three months later, this card is still working great on my 11 year old HP Pavilion Elite M9200t (no "gaming", just Microsoft Office 2016, graphics/photo editing, some video editing, Internet, machine embroidery digitizing & designing, etc.)

It is a nice card, and it is better than the ones that are running DDR4 memory. However the only drivers that will work on it are the 3xx.xx series, and not the newer drivers 4xx.xx if running Windows 7/10. This could be a problem of running newer/older games due to graphics/frame rates. Noticed a bit of a difference on MS Flight Simulator 2004 (FS9)/X compared to my GTX 750 ti. Graphics are not as crisp with the older drivers on this card, but frame rates are about the same if not a little better.Still a nice replacement card for the money, and better than the ones running the DDR4 memory.

Using this as a temporary graphics card until the 30 series stock gets back to normal and I can actually pay 500 bucks for a 500 bucks graphics card, I’m actually surprised how well it runs! Keep in mind I have an i9 but with MSI Afterburner I’ve gotten it to do a lot more than it was expected to do. Because it’s temporary I’ve been overclocking it a good bit and I’ve gotten pretty great frame on all games from DayZ to minecraft with shaders to Generation Zero, and not on low settings either a lot of the games I can run at a solid 60 FPS on at least medium, sometimes high and (if you are playing some older games) ultra. Only game I couldn’t get good frames with even when dropping it all the way down to potato settings was cyberpunk (but I wasn’t expecting a game that big and complex to run on an 80 dollar GPU) if you are just a casual player, need something temporary or whatever else you could use it for, this is a solid option