BioStar, a Taiwanese motherboard and graphics cards manufacturer, has recently added a new design theme to it’s lineup. It includes two GT 640’s and two GT 630’s. And you have to agree, those cards look familiar
First thing that you should notice is the this tiny version of the original GeForce GTX 690 shroud design. It actually looks like a GTX 690 (I doubt it features magnesium-alloy casing and a polycarbonate window) just with one core, but that’s a joke since it actually powers GeForce GT 640’s and GT 630’s. The interesting part is that BioStar has such a variety of designs, that it could lead to mistakes while trying to determine who was the original manufacturer. Simply put, BioStar has Inno3D’s, Point of View’s and MaxSun’s design copies in their lineup and of course there are also reference-based cards. Not to mention a large group of single-slot entry level models, which were generally made by BioStar.
Going back to our budget GTX 640 designs, we have two GeForce GTX 640’s: the VN6403THG1 and VN6403THX1, which basically differ only in memory size: 1GB and 2GB respectively. Both cards have a GPU clocked at 900 MHz, while the memory has the effective speed of 1800 MHz (that’s because it’s GDDR3). Not surprisingly these cards only arrive with a 128-bit interface. So obviously there is no chance of reaching its ‘fathers’ performance :)
The BioStar GeForce GT 630 VN6305TH51 and VN6305THG1 also have a different memory configuration. The first one only has 512 MB, while the other has 1GB. At least both cards have GDDR5 chips. Since the original GT 630 is based on Fermi architecture, they only support PCI-Express 2.0 interface. Besides that and the specific GPU version, there aren’t many differences between all four models. All arrive with the Solid Capacitors, DirectX 11 support, are equipped with DVI/VGA/HDMI (with HDCP support) outputs. If that doesn’t make you comfortable enough, let me assure you that all cards support Windows Vista! As advertised by the manufacturer, yeah… they actually did that.
I’m not sure about the MSRP of those cards, actually I could only find them listed on Chinese and Russian websites. So there’s no real chance of grabbing one of those, even for collection purposes.
