Nvidia’s rumored GTX 1630 budget graphics card is purportedly set to come out in just over a week, and we’ve seen some spilled specs for the GPU, too.
The latest speculation from VideoCardz on the GTX 1630 is that it will be released on May 31, and as for the specs, it’s essentially a cut-down spin on the GTX 1650.
The card will have a TU117-150 GPU (Turing, last-gen) with 512 CUDA Cores (meaning half will be disabled). The memory bus will also apparently be halved to 64-bit – with the GTX 1630 having 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM (at 12 Gbps). Overall bandwidth won’t be too far off the GTX 1650 SKU equipped with GDDR5 video memory (96GB/s versus 128GB/s).
Where the 1630 will better than the 1650 model is in the boost clock, apparently, which is expected to hit 1,800MHz, with the TDP maintained at 75W, as previously rumored.
Take all of this, as ever with hardware leaks, with a good deal of caution…
Analysis: Worries over performance levels – but price will be key, too
Given the release date is May 31, as VideoCardz points out, it’s likely that Nvidia will be revealing this budget GPU at Computex, which happens next week. If this new GTX graphics card is indeed inbound, and the tech site seems pretty sure on this now, that makes sense.
On the face of it, the GTX 1630 has been chopped down a bit more than expected, and it looks a little weak at first glance – there has certainly been plenty of disappointed reaction to the card online (though we must never get carried away with rumors, as the leaked specs may not be correct, or at least only partially right).
Still, assuming that the specs are pretty much in the right ballpark, initial speculation indicated that this GPU was going to be about as powerful as a GTX 1050 Ti – but now, some folks are worrying that it might only equate to the vanilla 1050. Still, given the ramped-up clock speed, it is still perfectly possible that we could see 1050 Ti frame rates (more or less) from the 1630.
Whatever the performance level of this graphics card turns out to be – of course, how this GPU stacks up to AMD’s low-end RX 6400 will also be key – it’ll be put in perspective with Nvidia’s pricing, and perhaps the GTX 1630 is going to be pitched cheaper than we expected.
About the only thing this leak hasn’t spilled is the price, with still no indication of that. In the last rumor, the chatter was around it dipping under the $200 mark in the US, but maybe Nvidia will push the MSRP further down than this (to more like $150 perhaps – maybe even a touch lower?). Then again, ‘reasonable’ isn’t a word that’s readily associated with GPU pricing these days, though things are now returning more to normal with graphics card price tags, slowly but surely. At any rate, Computex is around the corner, and we should find out the truth behind the GTX 1630 then…