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Panama, Panama City
1 Level
724 Review
50 Karma

Review on Gigabyte GeForce GT 1030 OC 2G Graphics Card (GV-N1030OC-2GI) by Nvidia by Dustin Wright

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works with outdated bios

My 8 year old computer definitely needs replacing but it does what I need it to do. My only problem was that the graphics card fan died, so I had to either build a new computer or replace the graphics card and squeeze some more out of this relic. Of course, given that the GPU market is overpriced due to data mining, it took me a while to figure out what kind of performance I was willing to pay for at the time, perhaps in terms of using it in a new one PC build over the next year. . Luckily, the extra research it required allowed me to stumble upon an issue I wasn't aware of. The problem is that a few years ago the PC BIOS was replaced by UEFI and the latest graphics cards don't even boot with the so-called "legacy" BIOS version anymore. After some research I found out that this 1030 card is one of the very latest cards that boots with an outdated BIOS, which is why I chose it. Also, it only cost about $70, which made the choice easy. It was easy to install, I stole the drivers from Nvidia, everything is fine. This card was theoretically 50% faster than the card it replaced, but as I ran new tests, it performed just a few percentage points on some tests and better on others. There are other bottlenecks in this old system so I'm not surprised but since I can't install anything newer than this model and my old card was dying I'm still happy with this purchase.

Pros
  • Very impressive
Cons
  • Crumpled packaging