Final words and conclusion
Performance
A lot can be said about the GTX 1630, but it doesn't offer much. Perhaps if you bought a CPU without integrated graphics, or need to build a media PC, then this can make some sense. But at an expected 125~150 USD price tag, the product is very limited. It's NVIDIA's slowest dedicated card of the past few years. It also lacks tensor and Raytracing cores. You get 512 Shader processors and a bit of memory to fool around a little in games, Full HD is your best bet at mediocre image quality setting if you like to reach 60 FPS.
Cooling & noise levels
Palit has a nice dual-fan cooler, and it can keep up with all of the ~50 watts of heat coming from the card. While the temperatures are in line, the acoustics, on the other hand, are consequential. We reached 35 Dba as noise acoustic level and hit temps under 65 Degrees C, that's all fine in my book.
Energy
Your heat production and energy consumption are always tightly tied to one another while you are using a (graphics) processor, and heat can be seen as a 1:1 condition, meaning that 50 Watts of (consumption) heat often equals 50 Watts of heat output. Thermal designs are built on this foundation. This card has a 150 Board power design. Which is tottering for a graphics card in the year 2022. At 50 Watts, we can't complain.
Coil whine
Detecting coil whine on this card was a hard thing (good). Graphics cards all make this in some form, especially in high framerates this can be perceived. In a closed chassis, that noise fades away in the background. We did not hear any coil whine though, the card did not reach FPS fast enough /:)
Pricing
Neither NVIDIA nor Palit communicated pricing for this product, we expect it to sit at a 150 USD marker. We'll have to wait and see how street prices will pan out though.
Tweaking
Due to lack of time, I still need to insert the full overclocking chapter however it performed quite well; we were able to gain roughly 10% in-game performance. But 10% of 30 FPS is perhaps 3 FPS more ... Our power limiter is restricted to 75W though. Unfortunately, RAM overclocking is no longer possible at a certain point. While 1675 MHz is stable. To be continued and updated though.
Conclusion
To tell you the truth, I'm still confused about why NVIDIA decided to release this card. When you reach 4 gigabytes of memory and further limit the memory bus to 64-bits, practically every game will run into issues fairly immediately. If, on the other hand, all you require is a desktop graphics card or media PC, then the purchase can make sense—that is, if the price is reasonable. However, we estimate that the price of this card will be somewhere about 150 USD. This is absolutely the slowest card that NVIDIA has produced over the course of the last few years, so that price tag is simply too high for what you receive. Because neither NVIDIA nor Palit was able to provide pricing information (or any information at all) for this evaluation, it is difficult to provide any suggestions at this time. Game performance, we'd say, look elsewhere.
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- Hilbert, LOAD"*",8,1.
