Introduction

About one month ago, NVIDIA released their GeForce GT 640 Series without much fanfare. The new GT 640 is based on the company's award-winning Kepler architecture, but uses a smaller, less powerful graphics processor than the GK104 GPU, we've come to love on GTX 670, 680 and 690. GT 640 also does not feature NVIDIA's boost clock algorithm which dynamically adjust clocks to increase performance if the card is running below its TDP limit.

The GeForce GT 640 is based on a 28 nm GK107 GPU, with a CUDA core count of 384. Unlike its high-end brethren, the card uses cheaper, but slower DDR3 memory, which you would also find on your mobo's memory modules, for example.



ZOTAC's GT 640, is one of the few single-slot GTX 640 cards on the market, which means it might be interesting for HTPC users. Clocks have remained at the NVIDIA default of 891 MHz GPU and 900 MHz memory. While there are variants with 1 GB memory, ZOTAC has put 2 GB on the card, whether this makes much sense is something we will know at the end of the review. Price-wise GT 640 is definitely not cheap, with a current retail price of $110 there are many options to consider, cheaper and more expensive.