nVidia GT730 revisited

Following my recent post extolling the virtues of the nVidia GT730 graphics card as my new entry-level choice, I wanted to try the card with GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit memory bus. The 1Gb DDR3 version with 64-bit memory bandwidth cost at the time £34, but this has since risen to well over £40 and even £50 in some cases. The GT740 model with GDDR5 and the 128-bit memory bandwidth are £80 or so which is dangerously close to the GT750 with Maxwell architecture offering much better performance. So, when I saw a Gigabyte GT730 with 2Gb of GDDR5 memory albeit with a 64-bit bus for just over £50 it seemed worthwhile to test and see if the extra capacity and faster memory makes much difference.

The benchmarks show at least 36% improvement which for an extra £10 seems worthwhile. The Gigabyte model also comes with a relatively large (10cm) cooling fan which should aid any over-clocking that you might want to apply to gain even greater performance improvement. Also with 2Gb texture memory modern games will run better. So, my entry-level choice has moved slightly to the nVidia GT730 with 2Gb GDDR5.

Testing Windows 10

I'm testing Microsoft's latest Windows 10 version and getting really good impressions from it. It appears to be combining some of the best features of the highly successful Windows 7 version together with the total disaster of Windows 8 in a consistent and modern approach. Gone is the weird Start menu, (unless you want it) and the Charms side menu. It is much easier to find apps and files now.

I'm running Windows 10 Technical Preview via the Insider program on an old DELL Optiplex GX520 with Intel Pentium D dual core at 3GHz and just 2Gb of DDR2 memory. Even on this low-end specification it runs reasonably responsive. I've yet to try any really demanding applications or games.

There are many new features though Cortana the speaking personal assistant is not available in the UK yet. Quite a number of the new apps are just place-holders requiring further development but even these add an integrated vision of what is to come. It appears that Microsoft has learnt its lesson from Windows 8 and the really good news is that it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10 for a year when it is released later this year. With this generous offer in place and from what I have seen so far, I'm a firm supporter of Windows 10.

Fixing my addiction

My New Year's resolution is to stop playing the Forge of Empires game. This free-to-play online game is taking up too much of my spare time and is becoming a real 'click fest' addiction. I've been playing it for over 15 months now and have five cities of which three are nearing completion. I love the building and quest elements of this game but the 4 and 8 hour production cycles that I have to adhere to, combined with the fear of being plundered is a real bind. And really at the higher levels it just takes too long to achieve any progress.

So, I'm quitting and replacing my time with the three games that I have as Christmas presents; Far Cry 4 the latest edition of my favourite 'first person shooter', Simcity the city builder and management game that I have played since its original version, and Hearthstone the free-to-play card collectors game. These should keep me occupied.

I'll be popping back to Forge of Empires to show my two year old granddaughter the little people walking along the abandoned streets and trying to guess which abandoned building they are going into. She loves that!

Graphics gone

My graphics card gave up the ghost! The XFX Radeon HD6870 decided that it didn't want to display any high resolution images any more and it was only three years old.


I tried analogue and digital outputs but it wouldn't go past the boot-up splash screen in any system that I installed it.

I'd never over-clocked it but it always ran warm at idle and very warm after a lengthy, intense gaming session. The ATX case was well vented and cooled with additional fans front and back. It failed at idle after the the system was sleeping so I don't think heat was directly a contributing factor. Not good reliability from a rather expensive card. And it has put me off XFX cards and AMD Radeon graphics.

I've replaced it with a considerably cheaper (£82), quieter and cooler card. The MSi Twin Frozr GeForce GTX 750OC Edition which feels about the same performance level. Let's hope that this lasts a bit longer.

Affordable gaming

Over the years I've built a few affordable gaming systems for clients and it is always a useful exercise in component selection and building to a budget. It is not always getting the cheapest, fastest bits and throwing them together in trying to achieve the best 'bang for the buck'.

As I've said before balance and quality are also factors that should be taken into account. As well as functional bling with extra buttons, LEDs, fans, windows all playing their part to make the system look more expensive than it is. With this in mind, the case I chose was the Zalman Z3 plus with four fans and a fan controller included. An easy case to work with costing just £30. The PSU was a Cooler master G500 a modern, quality unit with 80 Plus Bronze certified and fully compatible with Intel Haswell processors. Nothing modular, but cable routing in this case is not a problem.

The MSi H81-P32 motherboard and Intel Pentium G3258 CPU choice has been detailed in the previous post. The memory was a Kingston HyperX 1600MHz kit. Again not the cheapest but quality and reliable. Following my passion for SSD hard disks the Crucial MX100 256Gb is my model of choice at the moment coming in at just under £75. An additional traditional hard drive can easily be added at a later date. The AMD Radeon HD7770 2GB is an average graphics card at a reasonable price. An nVidia GTX 750 Ti is a more modern alternative.

All in all, a very nice performance system that will play most games well.

Intel's performance Pentium

I managed to get hold of one of the Intel Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary processors. This was released recently as the first over-clocklable Pentium CPU in a long while. It has been mentioned a lot online and in various publications as the good start to an entry-level gaming system. At a price of just £47 it is a real bargain.

Also instead of having to purchase an expensive motherboard with exotic overclock capabilities and settings, some of the manufacturers were releasing BIOS upgrades that would offer a basic overclock function. So the one I went for was the MSi H81-P32 board for just £37. This is a really neat micro-ATX board with a USB3 internal header making it suitable for modern cases. However I see now that this motherboard has been discontinued. Pity.

I was able to upgrade the BIOS to 1.8 version by putting a spare Haswell CPU into the Socket 1150 and running MSi's Live Update program from within Windows. I then swapped the Pentium G3258 processor in and rebooted without any problems. Next, I went into the UEFI BIOS and changed the CPU ratio from 32 to 42. I then had a Pentium processor overclocked to 4.2GHz. This was using the Intel stock air cooler which I noted is copper-cored and better than the usual Pentium coolers. People have managed to overclock this chip to 4.8GHz using better air or water coolers but I considered the extra 1GHz speed without any additional costs or risks is good enough. Under load the CPU temperature was 65C which is very acceptable.

A really good start to an affordable gaming system (£47 + £37) which I will detail in my next post.

New value graphics card champion

For the last couple of years or so, I've been installing AMD Radeon HD5450 graphics cards in family desktops so that basic games such as World of Warcraft, The Sims or Flight Simulator can be played. These cards also improve video playback, have a low power rating without additional connections, are silent (without noisy, little fans), can be adjusted to low profile cases and are fairly cheap to purchase, though the average price is increasing from £20 to £30 in that time.

I've occasionally purchased and tested similar cards such as Radeon HD6450 with DDR3 and DDR5, nVidia GT610, etc. The performance increase was generally not worth the extra cost. This week I saw an nVidia GT730 with 1GB DDR3 going for just £34 so I decided to try that. It is a short, PCIe 8-lanes card with a basic dual slot width heat-sink. Testing it shows that it doubles the PCmark7 score and trebles the 3Dmark06 figure. Yes, I know these benchmarks are old but it saves me re-benchmarking old cards and systems. And the games are old too. An impressive result and I'm sure that I will be purchasing more of these little video wonders.

Also, for a bit more money at about £60 I can get an nVidia GT640 with DDR5 and 128-bit memory bandwidth, so I will probably get one of these to see if the performance improvement is worth the extra cost. It should be.