Review: Nvidia Gainward GeForce GT 640 Rev 2 (GK208)

Final thoughts and conclusion

The slimline GeForce GT 640 (GK208) enables Full-HD gaming at medium-quality levels, remaining quiet and cool in the process.

Without any semblance of fanfare that usually greets new GPUs, Nvidia is quietly transitioning the volume-selling GeForce GT 640 from a GK107 to GK208 die. It is important to understand the differences, highlighted in this review, because the newer GT 640 offers more performance with lower power consumption.

Nvidia has rearchitected GT 640 with, now, higher frequencies allied to a leaner architecture. Continuing with codenames, the GT 640 GK208 is a better bet than the GK107 in almost every scenario. Gaming performance is on a par with the recently released and same-priced Radeon HD 7730, though, while substantially improved, GPGPU throughput, via OpenCL, still lags behind comparable AMD cards'.

Spending £60 buys you discrete cards that are manifestly better than any integrated graphics. The slimline GeForce GT 640 (GK208) enables Full-HD gaming at medium-quality levels, remaining quiet and cool in the process. Gainward's card is a solid implementation of the new technology and can be recommended as such.

The Good

GK208-based GT 640 faster than incumbent
Small, cool and quiet card primed for SFF systems
Solid performance at Full-HD resolution

The Bad

Though improved, GPGPU performance not as good as Radeons'.

HEXUS Awards

Gainward/Nvidia GeForce GT 640 Rev 2

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The reviewed card is available to purchase from Scan.co.uk.*

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Sometimes video card numbering defies logic - they're quite happy rebranding 680s as 770s, but a whole new gpu revision gets launched under an old moniker despite the 700 series not having any (non-oem) low end parts. Baffling, quite baffling.

Seems less of a good all round choice than the 7730 if you want to do more than just casual gaming. Not sure why NV hamstring their compute side of things so much when they started the whole ball rolling, but then again I guess they make mega bucks from Teslas…

This is very impressive. Dirt cheap, reasonably quiet and perfect for casual gaming at HD quality. Ideal for my work computer (as long as I do not tell the boss)

Indeed, why this isn't the GT 740 I guess we'll never know?

Interesting that they've pulled so much performance from a 64bit GDDR5 interface - makes you wonder if the 7730 is swimming in bandwidth it just doesn't need. At 1080p it's around 25% - 33% faster than an A10-6800k, but some of that will be down to faster CPU (3770k) and architectural improvements (GCN v VLIW4). Which means that having more than twice as much bandwidth, exclusively available to the GPU, is probably providing no more than a 20% boost in graphics performance…

Good card by nvidia this, though - and bodes well for the next round of GK2xx based cards, if they've managed to optimise the balance of the architecture to give better gaming performance at lower price and power draw…

Going on previous rebadgings, it would be a GT730. I gues Nvidia are preferring to retain the 7xx markings for their high/mid-range stuff, with a clear split from that down to the low/mid-range 6xx series.

Of course, they'll probably perform a “refresh” (rebadge) of the remaining 6xx-series cards towards the end of the year to realign against the incoming AMD update.