14 DAY TRIAL // It certainly took KFA2, Galaxy's European division, a while to announce its graphics card based on the GeForce GT 520, but the company has finally released a GF119 solution, which uses a low-profile PCB and active cooling setup.
The card doesn't seem to differ too much from all the other GT 520 models that were announced until now, as it features a pretty commonplace cooling solution comprised out of an aluminum heatsink and a low diameter fan.
Its specifications also don't seem to stray to much from Nvidia's recommended settings, although the memory comes clocked at a really low 500MHz (1000MHz effective).
To put things in perspective, Nvidia's reference design for the GT 520 has the memory running at 900MHz (1800MHz data rate), 55% higher than the KFA2 version of the card, while the GPU runs at the same 810MHz clock.
Why KFA2 chose to go this route is really hard to understand, especially considering the low memory bandwidth available to the GF119 GPU in the first place.
Just like all the other GT 520 solutions that were launched until now, the KFA2 version also packs a dual-link DVI video output, an HDMI port and a D-Sub connector.
KFA2 hasn't announced the price of its GT 520, but a quick search has revealed that this hovers around the £43 mark. The graphics card is bundled together with a DVI to VGA dongle and an HDMI cable.
The GT 520 is Nvidia latest entry-level GPU and was designed to replace the aging GeForce GT 220.
Unlike its predecessor, this card is based on Nvidia's Fermi architecture and is powered by the so-called GF119 core, which is basically a cut-in-half version of the GF108.
As a result, the GT 520 packs 48 stream processors, 8 texturing units, 4ROP units as well as a 64-bit wide memory interface.