14 DAY TRIAL // Even though the talk of this week is bound to be NVIDIA's controversial GeForce GTX Titan Z dual-chip monster, other video cards are making their debut as well, like the Inno3D GT 740 iChill.
For a video board purported to be in the “low end,” the GeForce GT 740 is surprisingly capable. Then again, it's not like add-in cards can afford to truly exemplify what “low end” means.
With CPUs and APUs featuring advanced enough graphics that normal tasks are taken care of, weak add-in video cards are obsolete.
Thus, even the weakest PCI Express products from AMD and NVIDIA need better than average resource levels.
It is rare nowadays to see a card with DDR3 memory instead of GDDR5 VRAM, and those that do go that low are usually low-profile models from entry-level nettops and HTPCs.
Case in point, the “entry-level” GeForce GT(X?) 740 that Inno3D has just unveiled, and which is called GT 740 iChill, has 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.3 GHz.
The RAM is controlled by the graphics processing unit via an interface with a width of 128 bits. Speaking of which, the GPU is a GK107-425.
That means it has 384 CUDA cores, 16 ROPs (raster operating units), and 32 TMUs (texture mapping units). Also, the clock is of 1100 MHz.
Normally, the GT 740 runs at 993 MHz. Not that you'll see the number that often, since the GT 740 is pretty rare.
In fact, the Inno3D GeForce GT 740 iChill hasn't technically been released yet. Only leaked to the net via Chiphell websites. You can see the presentation slides below.
“iChill” comes from the name of the cooler, the iChill HerculeZ 2000, which pulls heat from the GPU via a pair of 8 mm heatpipes and feeds it to an aluminum fin stack.
Two fans with a diameter of 100 mm disperse the heat, and they are held in place by a cooler shroud that is attached to the heatsink via six screws.
All in all, the Inno3D GeForce GT 740 should be superior to the GeForce GTX 650, despite technically being one level under its predecessor, hierarchy-wise. Finally, the TDP (thermal design power) is of 65W and the price should be of $109 / €109.
The leak didn't actually provide the price, but the GTX 650 sold for that much, so we're making an educated guess. Besides, the GTX 750 ships for $130 / €130 on average, so it fits.
