EVGA has been producing graphics cards since the late 90s and has doing a pretty good of it too. It not be quite as prominent these days as it once was, but its hardware is still up to scratch and can stand toe to toe with the more popular manufacturers.
The EVGA GT 740 Superclocked graphics card uses the GK107-425-A2 GPU variant of the popular mid-level GK107 GPU that was released last year by Nvidia. The original GPU clock speed of the GT 740 was around 990MHz, but EVGA has given this version of the GPU an turbo boost of 9% to 1085MHz, although oddly the memory clock speed was left at the original 1250MHz.
This is a dual-slot card that measures 111 x 152 x 38mm, with a mini-HDMI and a pair of DVI ports. There’s a large heatsink casing that houses a 100mm fan, which keeps the card relatively cool during operation. There’s also another edition of this card, which is single slot and features a smaller heatsink and fan casing over the back quarter of the card. Either way, both cards appear, on paper at least, to perform the same.
Speaking of performance, the benchmarks were marginally better than the R7 240. Battlefield 4 at 1080 scored 31fps, Skyrim with the same Ultra settings and 8x AA scored 32fps, and Watch Dogs squeezed out a more reasonable 30fps. The 3DMark 11 benchmark score was 2,840 – was better than the 2,650 of the R7 240.
The reason we’re comparing the two is because they stand at pretty much the same price level. The R7 is £72, whereas the EVGA GT 740 costs in the region of £85, depending on where you shop. For just over a tenner more, you therefore get a slight improvement on the GPU power and a few more frames per second.
As with the R7, though, the GT 740 performs extremely well as a non-gaming, power user graphics card. HD video content, streamed or via Bluray, performs without any flaw. And picture or video editing seems to be without issue as well.
This isn’t a bad graphics card, by our reckoning. It’s still under £100, and it can play modern games with a reasonable amount of frames. As before, though, it's beginning to look its age, in terms of graphical gaming performance, and it will probably reach the end of its shelf life very soon. Otherwise, an okay card.