- Dirt 2 (DirectX 11)

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. The game runs on an updated version of the EGO engine, which powered Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid as well. The engine features an updated physics engine and makes pretty through use of the DX11’s tessellation abilities.

According to the chart below, the Gigabyte GV-N430OC-1G (GT 430) can play the Dirt2 game at 1920 x 1200 provided that you will keep the quality settings not any higher than the "Medium." That's not a bad tradeoff for a card of this category. The specific DX11 game also put the GT 430 in the lead over the Radeon 5670 OC but not the Radeon HD 5770.

Compared to the stock Inno3D GT 430, the Gigabyte GV-N430OC-1G will run the game faster by just ~ 1 FPS:

- Alien vs Predator Benchmark v1.03 (DirectX 11)

Rebellion has released a standalone DirectX 11 PC benchmark test based upon its shooter Aliens vs. Predator. The benchmark test requires a graphics support supporting DirectX 11, which are used to produce such fancy features as tessellation, advanced shadow sampling and DX11 anti-aliasing.

We used the default settings of the benchmark (resolution: 1920 x 1200, Texture Quality: 2, Shadow Quality: 3, Anisotropic Filtering: 16, SSAO: ON, Vertical Sync: OFF, DX11 Tessellation: ON, DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON, DX11 MSAA Samples: 1).

The Gigabyte GT 430 gave an average FPS of 10.80, and the Inno3D GT430 followed closely with ~10.50 FPS. Overclocking did not make any difference here in favor of Gigabyte's solution. However, it is obvious that the requirements of the game are very demanding for these cards, at least for these settings. For comparison, even a GTS 450 would give you an average ~22.60 FPS under the same settings.

- Overclocking

We are ready to test the overclocking abilities of the Gigabyte Gigabyte GV-N430OC-1G graphics card.

For our overclocking tests we used the latest MSI AfterBurner utility which also allows you to unlock the card's voltages allowing further tweaking. We enabled the 'Core Voltage' slider (though the 'settings' tab). The Core Voltage slider can go very high to further increase the overclocking margins although we feel that you won't need to go very high here. The 'Core' and 'Shader' sliders are synched and move as one, allowing you to play with the 'Memory' slider as well. The package also includes the 'MSI Kombustor' application that stresses your graphics card and test its stability.

The Gigabyte GV-N430OC-1G is featuring an improved cooling system compared to the one used by the Inno3D GT 430. This allowed us to push the limits of the Gigabyte GT 430 a little bit more, although the card comes pre-overclocked. After many hours of testing we found that settings the GPU core at 860MHz and the memory at 1100MHz is stable enough to play the "Crysis Warhead" game without any issues.