My
2009 PC Build may not be my primary PC, but It is still a fairly competent system for most tasks, so I keep it around.
I recently learned that NVidia "re-released" the 9800GTX+ as the 250 GTS, with much reduced power usage. While researching to find a used card on Ebay, I found the price point was around the price of a GT 1030 (~100 CAD) so I decided to give that a try, once doing a quick check and making sure that it was not in fact going to perform worse than the 9800GTX+.
What I did not expect was that it basically beats out the 9800GTX+ in pretty much every single way.
Size wise, The GT 1030 is a fairly small card. It's not going to interfere with any drive cages at the front of the system. Additionally it is a sort of "one and half slot" card. It only has a bracket for one slot, and while it doesn't have a lot of clearance, it is possible to squeeze a card into the PCI slot next to it. A free slot is a free slot though, and a smaller card would allow for better airflow overall as well.
The GT 1030 is also fairly low power in terms of actual electricity usage. Compared to the 9800GTX+ it replaced in my case it uses 6 times less power in general. The card doesn't even have a PCI-E Power socket because it does not require power beyond what the PCI-E slot can provide. It's 30 Watt TDP dwarfs the 9800GTX+'s 140 Watts.
One unexpected surprise that I had not even considered going into it was how much quieter it is. The Gigabyte model I got has a rather large fan, and compared to the 9800GTX+, the system sounded almost silent with the 1030 installed (to the point where I didn't immediately realize it had even powered up until the monitor came on)
For replacing older cards or upgrading the video in somewhat older systems, like the 9800GTX+ in my case, it is almost a no-brainer. If the system gets much use than it will eventually pay for itself just in terms of lower power usage. (Though in this case the use of a QX6700 CPU probably isn't helping in that department, either...) It also greatly outperforms it, is much quieter, is physically smaller, and provides access to more modern Technologies/APIs and subsequently more recent games.
