Advancements made by iGPUs by AMD and Intel in the recent years essentially destroyed the market of inexpensive discrete video cards. High-performance iGPUs can outperform low-end standalone graphics adapters these days and for a lot of users performance of integrated graphics is enough. Nonetheless, there's still a smaller market for low-end add-in boards - notably as upgrades to true entry-level PCs - and to that end NVIDIA’s partners this week released a new breed of low-end graphics cards targeting entry-level PCs.

The new NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 video cards are based on a cut-down version of the company's existing GK208 GPU, with 192 stream processors, 16 texture units and 8 ROPs. As this is a Kepler architecture product, you'll find baseline support for Direct3D feature level 11_0 but not newer features found in the Maxwell generation such as HDMI 2.0, which is likely why NVIDIA opted to launch this as a 700 series product. Peak compute performance of the GPU when clocked at 954 MHz is around 366 GFLOPS, which is below that of contemporary higher-end iGPUs by Intel or AMD. The GeForce GT 710 graphics cards are equipped with 1 or 2 GB or DDR3-1800 memory featuring 14.4 GB/s bandwidth.

NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison
  GT 710 GT 720 GT 630 GT 610
CUDA Cores 192 192 192 48
Texture Units 16 16 16 8
ROPs 8 8 16 4
Core Clock 954MHz 797MHz 875MHz 710MHz
Shader Clock N/A N/A N/A 1620MHz
Memory Clock 1.8GHz DDR3 1.8GHz DDR3/ 5GHz GDDR5 1.8GHz DDR3 1.8GHz DDR3
Memory Bus Width 64-bit 64-bit 64-bit 64-bit
VRAM 1GB or 2GB 1GB or 2GB 1GB or 2GB 1GB
TDP 19W 19W 50W 29W
GPU GK208 GK208 GK107 GF119
Launch Timeframe January, 2016 March, 2014 April, 2012 May, 2012
Launch Price $30 - $50 $49 OEM $49

Makers of graphics cards position their NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 boards as solutions for entry-level PCs running Intel Celeron or Intel Pentium processors with mediocre iGPUs, and these are typically the comparisons you'llsee vendors make as it doesn't take much to surpass low-end iGPUs. That said, while the GeForce GT 710 can indeed be considerably faster than outdated integrated GPUs, it is unlikely that it can enable decent performance in demanding video games, and this is more likely to be pitched as a card for MOBAs and similar low-impact games.

From a sales perspective, since the GK208 GPU is not a new graphics chip - having been launched back in 2013 - it is somewhat surprising to see that virtually all partners of NVIDIA decided to release their new video cards powered by the GPU. The market for such adapters is very limited these days because 100% of entry-level PCs use iGPUs. Moreover, even in countries like China, where inexpensive hardware is sold in large quantities, more and more gamers are adopting higher-end discrete video cards, according to media reports.

Meanwhile from a technical perspective, as the GeForce GTX 710 are designed for low-end PCs, many of such video cards come in half-height/half-length form-factor. Typical for low-end cards (especially those expected to sell well in the APAC market), all of the GT 710s we've seen so far feature D-Sub analogue monitor output for compatibility with older monitors, along with the more typical DVI and/or HDMI/DP connectors. Meanwhile GT 710 is rated for a TDP of just 20 W, so many of the cards use passive cooling solutions, while the rest feature small fans.

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 graphics cards are available from companies like ASUS, EVGA, Galax, Gigabyte, Inno3D, Palit Multimedia, Manli, MSI, ZOTAC and some others. Prices of the GeForce GT 710-based graphics adapters vary, but typically such cards cost from $30 to $50 in the U.S.

Comments Locked

60 Comments

View All Comments

  • tareyza - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    No coverage on Intel's new high end Iris iGPU? (The ones with the 2+3e for example) It seems they were just released, here's a video of a laptop with one:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-uIC-K0vFs&ab...
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    In fact we just had a story on the subject yesterday: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9990/skylake-iris-pr...
  • tareyza - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    Sorry, I should clarify, I meant the ones with consumer chips (like the i series). Although that article does detail the 4e variant, it doesn't mention the 3e variant or pricing/details on the consumer (i.e. non-Xeon) 4e variants.
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    2+3e won't be coming for the desktop. As for mobile, we'll be looking at those once we have review units in.
  • tareyza - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    Cool, looking forward to it then,
  • Byte - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    I think they have a nice market by making videos cards with 1 of every output or 4 of 1 type of output.
  • Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link

    Shortcut to the "gaming" part - 16 minutes in, Bioshock Infinite gets briefly played at 1080p Medium, and seems to be pretty stable in the low 30fps ballpark.
  • Samus - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    Kepler? Really? Are they just using old inventory at this point or something because I don't see any reason NVidia should be launching non-Maxwell based parts in 2016?
  • yannigr2 - Wednesday, January 27, 2016 - link

    GT 930 will have three versions. One Maxwell 1, one Kepler and one Fermi.
  • silverblue - Thursday, January 28, 2016 - link

    I'm waiting for a certain ch- person to waltz in here saying this isn't a rebrand. And that there is a market for this.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now