We’re still waiting for Kepler derivatives to populate the $200-300 sweet spot, but Nvidia has just tackled the lower rungs of the market with a diminutive Kepler-based graphics card dubbed the GeForce GT 640. There has been no official announcement, but Newegg is already carrying a custom-cooled Gigabyte variant of the new card for $109.99. Zotac, which tipped us off about the GT 640, tells us Nvidia is shooting for prices under the $100 mark.
Here’s a peek at the reference design, as pictured on Nvidia’s website. Note the stubby circuit board and the diminutive cooler:
(Pictures of Zotac’s GeForce GT 640 model can be found in the image gallery below.The Zotac card has a larger heatsink and, unlike the reference design, supports triple-display setups. It’s still saddled with a tiny, potentially noisy fan, though.)
Under that heatsink, the GT 640 packs a 28-nm Kepler-derived chip with a die size of 118 mm². This chip has 384 ALUs, all of which are enabled on the GT 640, and it features a 128-bit path to memory. As you can see in the table below, the GT 640 has DDR3 memory, so it ends up with about the same amount of memory bandwidth as the DDR3 version of the GeForce GT 440. However, the new card has substantially more pixel-pushing resources:
GPU base clock (MHz) |
GPU boost clock (MHz) |
Shader ALUs |
Textures filtered/ clock |
ROP pixels/ clock |
Memory transfer rate |
Memory type |
Memory interface width (bits) |
Peak power draw |
|
GeForce GT 440 | 810 | N/A | 96 | 16 | 4 | 1.8/3.2 GT/s | DDR3/GDDR5 | 128 | 65W |
GeForce GTS 450 | 783 | N/A | 192 | 32 | 16 | 3.6 GT/s | GDDR5 | 128 | 106W |
GeForce GT 640 | 900 | N/A | 384 | 32 | 16 | 1.8 GT/s | DDR3 | 128 | 65W |
According to the information Zotac provided us, the GeForce GT 640 ends up performing 40% better than the GeForce GT 440 overall, with 50% higher performance per watt. The two cards do have the same power envelope, though. We’ll be taking a closer look at the GeForce GT 640 soon, so stay tuned.