Just two days after information about the potential release date of the GeForce GTX 1630 graphics card got out, we have an update on the matter. Now, we have real-life pictures of one of the variants which give us our first official look at the card since it was originally leaked. For those of you unaware, GTX 1630 is an upcoming entry-level GPU from NVIDIA, set to replace the legendary GTX 1050 Ti. As the name suggests, the GTX 1630 is part of the company’s 16-series of budget GPUs, but more importantly, it’s the first xx30-class “GTX” card NVIDIA has ever made. Two days ago, the Chinese Board Channels supposedly leaked the launch date of the GTX 1630 to be June 28th, 2022. This news was important because the card has already been subjected to three delays at this point, where it was originally supposed to come out on May 31st.
COLORFUL GTX 1630 pictured
The notice posted on the Chinese Board Channels was by COLORFUL, a popular GPU manufacturer in Asia, so the date was somewhat believable. Just a couple of days later, today, Videocardz managed to get their hands on real renders of the GTX 1630 from COLORFUL, further adding to the authenticity of that date. The model leaked here is the BattleAx variant which is the brand’s entry-level lineup. To no one’s surprise, the GTX 1630 BattleAx looks exactly like the GTX 1650 BattleAx, because both graphics card use the same GPU and are largely identical. We already know from previous leaks that manufacturers are recycling their GTX 1650 designs for the new GTX 1630. As you can see in the render above, we’re looking at a dual-fan design with an aluminum heatsink extending to cover the entire width of the card. No heat pipes can be seen under that shroud, which makes sense for a card this budget. Videocardz mentions that this is not a factory-overlooked model, but despite that fact it still features a 6-pin external power connector. The GTX 1650 and 1630, both are 75W GPUs and therefore do not require any external power. Aftermarket variants with increased power limits, however, do. So that indicates that perhaps this GPU can be pushed to its absolute limits thanks to that external power connector. Moreover, at the back of the graphics card, it sports three display connectors, one each of HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI. It’s commonplace to still see DVI ports present on budget and entry-level GPUs. As for the specs, we’re unsure about the exact specifications of this variant, thought they certainly wouldn’t stray away from the reference specs; only point of contention is that TGP. Therefore, we can say that the COLORFUL GTX 1630 BattleAx is using a TU117 GPU featuring 512 CUDA Cores. The card is expected to have a factory boost clock of 1800MHz. The GTX 1650 also uses the same GPU but has 896 CUDA Cores instead, which means the 1630 is utilizing a cut-down version of it (TU117-150 vs. TU117-300). Same goes for the memory whose bus width has been sliced in half from 128-bit (on the 1650) to just 64-bit on the GTX 1630. It still has the same 4GB of GDDR6 VRAM, though, because of the reduced bus width, the memory bandwidth has now dropped to just 96GB/s, slower than even the GTX 1050 Ti. As mentioned before, the card is reported to launch on June 28th, so just 3 days from now, and this leak comes right in time for that. Since there has been no official announcement from NVIDIA yet, we still can’t say that it’s locked, but we won’t have to wait long to find out. Hopefully, the GPU is not marred by any other delays.
