NVIDIA GeForce MX250 vs NVIDIA GeForce MX330

NVIDIA GeForce MX250

The Nvidia GeForce MX250 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It is based on the same Pascal GP108 chip as the predecessor, the GeForce MX150 / desktop GeForce GT 1030 but features increased clock speeds. As with the MX150, the MX250 is available in two versions, the normal 25 Watt version (1D13 device ID) and a low power version with 10 Watt TDP (1D25 device ID) and reduced performance (The MX150 with 10W had a 32% lower clock speed). The GDDR5 memory interface now also supports speeds up to 3.5 GHz = 7 GHz effective (up from 3 GHz).

The GP108 chip is manufactured in a 14 nm FinFET process at Samsung (LPP) and offers a number of new features, including support for DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). 4K HDR with Netflix however wont run due to the minimum 3 GB graphics memory that is required. Compared to the bigger Pascal chips, the small GP108 does not support Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) for VR and G-Sync. A full list of improvements and the new Pascal desktop GPUs is available in our dedicated Pascal architecture article.

Thanks to the increased core speeds (up to +3% in Boost for the 25 Watt version, and faster memory speeds), the new MX250 should be slightly faster than the older MX150. First benchmarks indicate a 5% increase. Still modern should only run fluent in low settings (see the page of the MX150 for games and benchmarks).

NVIDIA GeForce MX330

The Nvidia GeForce MX330 is a dedicated entry-level mobile graphics card for laptops. It was released in February 2020 and is basically a renamed Geforce MX250 / GeForce MX150 / desktop GeForce GT 1030. It uses the same GP108 chip as the MX250 (GP108-655-A1 e.g.). It offers the same 384 CUDA cores as the MX250 and MX150 and also the clock speeds only increased slightly (+12 MHz Boost = 0.8% for the 25 Watt version). The dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory is connected via a 64 Bit memory bus and clocked at 3500 MHz (7000 MHz effective) leading to maximal bandwidth of 56 GB/s. Again there is a 25 Watt and slower 12 Watt (low power) variant.

In Nvidia drivers the GeForce MX330 appeared with the hardware ID 1D16.

The GP108 chip is manufactured in a 16 nm FinFET process and offers a number of new features, including support for DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). 4K HDR with Netflix however won't run due to the minimum 3 GB graphics memory that is required. Compared to the bigger Pascal chips, the small GP108 does not support Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) for VR and G-Sync. A full list of improvements and the new Pascal desktop GPUs is available in our dedicated Pascal architecture article.

The performance of the GeForce MX330 should be identical to the MX150 and MX250 of previous years. See our GeForce MX250 page for gaming benchmarks. Nvidia states on the product page that the MX330 offers 2x of the performance of a Intel Iris Plus Graphics G7 in an i7-1065G7 (vs 2.5x of the MX350).  Therefore, very demanding games like Red Dead Redemption 2 will not run smoothly, older and less demanding games like Fifa 20 or Farming Simulator 19 however should run fine in medium settings (see below for our benchmark results with different laptops). The low power version (see below) will be clearly slower however.

There is a low power version N17S-LP with a TGP of 12 Watt (up 2 Watt from 10 Watt of the LP MX250) and a "normal" 25 Watt N17S-G3. The performance of both variants should clearly differ. The low power variant offers relatively slow clock rates of 746 - 936 MHz (base - Turbo), where the 25 Watt G3 variant is clocked at 1531 - 1594 (similar to the MX250 and +70% boost clock versus the LP variant).