ASUS GT730-SL-2GD5-BRK

The GT 730's 2GB VRAM lands at the dead bottom of our database—0th percentile—and its 4K support tops out at a stuttery 30Hz. User sentiment is a rough 15th percentile, with common complaints about power supply demands and overheating. It's a niche card for silent HDMI outputs; for everyone else, integrated graphics are better and free.

The ASUS GT 730 is a quiet little card that punches way above its weight in one very specific area—display output. Its 4K support ranks in the 92nd percentile among GPUs in our database, which sounds impressive until you realize it's capped at a choppy 30Hz refresh rate. Still, for a dead-silent HTPC or a reliable multi-monitor office setup, that 4K headline grabber covers the basics. Look past the resolution number and you'll find specs that haven't aged well. With just 2GB of DDR5 VRAM (0th percentile), a pedestrian boost clock of 927 MHz, and a GPU score in the 38th percentile, this isn't a card for gaming or content creation. It's a display adapter with a fanless cooler, plain and simple.

Under the hood, the GT 730's 384 CUDA cores are running on a PCIe 2.0 bus, which is ancient by modern standards. Our database slots its raw GPU performance at the 38th percentile, meaning it's slower than 62% of all tested discrete and integrated solutions. In practical terms, you can forget about anything beyond 720p gaming or light photo editing—our best-for-gaming score of 16.5/100 essentially calls it a non-starter for modern titles. What it does well is stay cool and quiet while pushing pixels to up to three monitors at once. The passive heatsink works as advertised, and the 0dB rating is a boon for home theater PCs. Just don't expect it to accelerate 4K video beyond basic decoding; the lack of modern codec support and limited bandwidth can lead to stuttering with high-bitrate streams.

Pricing is all over the place—we've seen listings from $60 to a baffling $20,107 (likely a scalper's fever dream). At the $60 end, you're getting a simple video card for a budget silent build, which is fair. But for any more than that, you're overpaying for very old silicon. Our database shows integrated graphics in modern CPUs trounce this card, so unless you absolutely need an extra HDMI port on a legacy system, the value evaporates fast.

There aren't many direct competitors left in this ultra-budget, fanless niche, but modern integrated graphics are the real rival. Intel's UHD 620 or AMD's Vega 3 iGPU can match or beat the GT 730 in compute and media playback while sipping less power and adding zero cost. Against other budget cards like the GT 1030, the 730 falls behind by a mile—the 1030 scores roughly double the gaming performance. Basically, this card only makes sense if your CPU has no integrated graphics and you just want a silent HDMI output.

Skip this card if you plan to game, edit 4K video, or even just want a smooth 4K desktop experience—the 38th percentile GPU performance and 0th percentile VRAM make those tasks painful. Developers and creators should steer far away too, given the abysmal 10.8/100 best-for-developer score. If your setup already has integrated graphics from the last five years, you'll gain nothing by adding this card; in many cases, you'll actually lose performance.

Buy the ASUS GT 730 if you're reviving an old office PC that needs a silent display adapter, or if you're building a noiseless HTPC for 1080p media. The included brackets and multi-monitor support are genuine perks at this price. But the 15th percentile user sentiment score isn't just noise—owners gripe about 4K@30Hz limitations and power supply worries that can turn a simple upgrade into a headache. For almost any other use, a modern iGPU gives you more performance without spending a dime.