For example, the Dirt 2 Rally was barely playable with Intel HD 3000 while the GT 430 was able to play the game smoothly with full settings.įuturemark’s PCMark Vantage is an excellent testing suite to see how well these two GPUs work in real-world user-scenarios such as playing movies, handling photos or playing games.Īs can be seen from the test results above, there is no real difference in the video playback capabilities (TV and movies score), while the difference is much greater when editing photos (memories score) or playing games. While the gaming graphics score difference does not look that great on paper, there is quite big difference in gaming performance in practice. The discrete GPU has a clear advantage in the desktop graphics, which means that you will get better performance e.g. Windows Experience IndexĪs you can see from the screenshots below, there is quite significant difference between the two contenders (45% overall improvement with the GT 430). Some people may find the fan noise disturbing, so you should get a passively cooled version if possible. The GT 430 does not generate much additional heat with a cooling fan, but provides an audible fan noise. While there are many newer GPUs available in the market, this card is still regarded as one of the best video cards for demanding home theater PC usage. I chose Asus GeForce GT 430 with a cooling fan as a discrete video card for this comparison. I used Intel Core i3-2105 with Intel HD 3000 graphics in my old HTPC system and it has an excellent price to performance ratio and it provided enough performance for media center tasks. Let’s find out which one is ideal for the home theater PC use. The testing methodology includes the following benchmarks:

In this comparison, you will learn the main differences between an integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics and discrete video card NVIDIA GeForce GT 430. When building a new home theater computer, a common question is whether you should run off the Intel HD 3000 graphics or do you need a discrete video card.

Hd graphics 3000