Hey guys,
I am back with another graphics card review for you today. But unlike the usual trend here, this time it's an entry level XFX Geforce 210 512MB graphics card.
This is the first graphics chipset along with GT220 from Nvidia's stable to support DirectX10.1 and made using TSMC 40nm fabrication.
This product is based around GT218 core which is first from NVIDIA to have inbuilt audio processing engine to provide 7.1channel surround sound through onboard HDMI port.
So this clearly means it is aimed at HTPC market.
Let's not waste too much time and move straight to specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
From the specifications it's very clear that this is not aimed at gamers. It is aimed mainly at HTPC segment or people who play with very low details at lower resolutions.
The most disappointing part is the 512MB 64bit DDR2 memory interface.
The card does bring Native HDMI 1.3a support and 7.1 LCPM output which was missing from previous NVIDIA cards.
Lets take a look at the product itself.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 1]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 1
The Box Front
The box is tiny. There is no fancy packaging here. The phone should give you an idea about the size.
The Box Back
The back of the box as usual has list of features. Frankly, most of these including PhysX are not much of an use on this card considering the low horsepower nature of this chip. But it supports these.
The Label on the box.
Contents of the package
The bundle is very minimal. There are no cables, or adapters included with this card. Just driver CD and manual.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 2]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 2
The Card, Front.
As you can clearly see, its a tiny card. Its about the size of good old Ethernet card or internal modems.
It has a tiny heatsink and fan over the core. Nothing fancy. DDR2 memory is not cooled by ramsink and are exposed.
The Card, Back
2 Memory chips are located on the back of the PCB.
The output ports
The card has HDMI 1.3a, DVI and VGA port.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 3]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 3
Heatsink Removed
Exposed Card
GT218 Core
The Core
If you read the HD5870 review and saw the core picture of that card next to 5 rupee coin, that will give you an idea how tiny this core is. This makes Rs.5 coin look like a giant.
Samsung Memory Chip
That's it for the pictures. Let's move onto the test setup.
[BREAK=Test Setup and How we Tested.]
Test Setup
We have the Intel's i7 platform as a test bench.
Processor : Intel Xeon W3520 overclocked to 4.2Ghz
Ram : 6GB OCZ Platinum at 1600Mhz 7-7-7-20
Motherboard : Gigabyte X58 UD5
Power Supply : Tagan BZ1300
Optical Drive : LG GGW-H20N BlueRay Drive
Operating System : Windows 7 Ultimate X64
Its a standard i7 platform with decent overclock on the processor to eliminate the processor limitations as much as possible. The W3520 is equivalent to i7 920. These are identical chips in every way. The Xeons are usually better binned product. Other than that, there is no difference between i7 920 and W3520.
How we tested
It was very clear from the beginning, that usual testing methods we adopt here are not going to work. The specification themselves made it very clear that this card will not be able to compete against anything other than low end 9400GS/GT counterpart.
So we had to improvise. I basically tried to get the playable settings for this game. So this review will at least give you an idea at what settings you will be able to play the game with acceptable performance.
[BREAK=Playable game settings and Results.]
Playable game settings and Results.
I tested the game with the usual set of benchmarks with exception of STALKER. Even with minimal settings, the game was almost unplayable and un enjoyable on this card. The STALKER stuttering was bad enough to miss simple shots.
None of the games were playable with any AA or AF settings. So it was left off for all games.
Results
As you can clearly see, the card really struggles even at low settings in most games at modest resolution of 1280x1024.
This is not surprising seeing the specifications.
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage also yielded poor results scoring less than 800 points for performance preset.
[BREAK=Video Playback]
This is the most important function of this card. And it does not disappoint here.
It played all content I had flawlessly. HD content was played back as it should. The HDMI audio out worked as advertised and gave 7.1 channel output.
There is nothing to complain about in this department. The GPU acceleration was definitely working for all videos including x264 and WMV HD content.
Here is a sample screenshot of 1080P x264 playback CPU usage. Almost all work is offloaded to the GPU.
[BREAK=Temperature, Power Usage and Conclusion]
Temperature and Power Usage
The card never really ran hot. It idled in the high 30s range and peaked at 66C even with its tiny heatsink. So its all good in this department.
To test the power usage, I borrowed a APC 1KVA UPS and tested system load using Fur render. At idle the entire setup was eating just 167Watts. And under full load the system was pulling 275Watts which is not bad at all for such highly overclocked system.
My HD 4670 pulls 35Watts more at peak in the same system.
Conclusion
The Geforce 210 is not exactly regular high profile card release from Nvidia. And to be honest, even if you are a casual gamer, you will be wondering what was the point of this card.
The gaming performance is poor, it does not have any exceptional features that competition does not have. In fact HD3400 series had same features and it was released more than a year back.
An year old HD4670 will put this card to shame in gaming and similarly priced 9500GT will outperform this card. So it makes one wonder why Nvidia wanted to achieve from this?
The only logical conclusion is that they wanted to offer something which they didnt in the past. They did not have a chip which was suitable as a all in one solution for HTPC setup. All their previous cards had to rely on onboard sound solution to output sound through HDMI. This card fixed that and also eats less power than their other cards in same price range.
This can also be a test card from Nvidia to see how 40nm manufacturing pans out for them in the near future.
But at the back of the mind, I cant shake the feeling that they are too little too late to the party.
XFX Geforce 210 does make an attractive HTPC solution. It will in the end boil down to what users want in their system. If you need a low power graphics card which does fits even in low height mATX / HTPC cases without breaking bank, this does looks like an attractive solution. But if you want a card which will offer a decent gaming performance, look at other options.
Indicative Market Price : Rs.2950/- From Rashi Peripherals.
My score card
Features : 6.5/10
Performance : 5/10
Value For Money : 7/10
Overall : 6/10
Thanks to XFX and Rashi Peripherals for sending me early review sample.
Please Digg this review here : XFX Geforce 210 Review
I am back with another graphics card review for you today. But unlike the usual trend here, this time it's an entry level XFX Geforce 210 512MB graphics card.
This is the first graphics chipset along with GT220 from Nvidia's stable to support DirectX10.1 and made using TSMC 40nm fabrication.
This product is based around GT218 core which is first from NVIDIA to have inbuilt audio processing engine to provide 7.1channel surround sound through onboard HDMI port.
So this clearly means it is aimed at HTPC market.
Let's not waste too much time and move straight to specifications.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications
From the specifications it's very clear that this is not aimed at gamers. It is aimed mainly at HTPC segment or people who play with very low details at lower resolutions.
The most disappointing part is the 512MB 64bit DDR2 memory interface.
The card does bring Native HDMI 1.3a support and 7.1 LCPM output which was missing from previous NVIDIA cards.
Lets take a look at the product itself.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 1]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 1
The Box Front
The box is tiny. There is no fancy packaging here. The phone should give you an idea about the size.
The Box Back
The back of the box as usual has list of features. Frankly, most of these including PhysX are not much of an use on this card considering the low horsepower nature of this chip. But it supports these.
The Label on the box.
Contents of the package
The bundle is very minimal. There are no cables, or adapters included with this card. Just driver CD and manual.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 2]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 2
The Card, Front.
As you can clearly see, its a tiny card. Its about the size of good old Ethernet card or internal modems.
It has a tiny heatsink and fan over the core. Nothing fancy. DDR2 memory is not cooled by ramsink and are exposed.
The Card, Back
2 Memory chips are located on the back of the PCB.
The output ports
The card has HDMI 1.3a, DVI and VGA port.
[BREAK=XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 3]
XFX Geforce 210 Pictures 3
Heatsink Removed
Exposed Card
GT218 Core
The Core
If you read the HD5870 review and saw the core picture of that card next to 5 rupee coin, that will give you an idea how tiny this core is. This makes Rs.5 coin look like a giant.
Samsung Memory Chip
That's it for the pictures. Let's move onto the test setup.
[BREAK=Test Setup and How we Tested.]
Test Setup
We have the Intel's i7 platform as a test bench.
Processor : Intel Xeon W3520 overclocked to 4.2Ghz
Ram : 6GB OCZ Platinum at 1600Mhz 7-7-7-20
Motherboard : Gigabyte X58 UD5
Power Supply : Tagan BZ1300
Optical Drive : LG GGW-H20N BlueRay Drive
Operating System : Windows 7 Ultimate X64
Its a standard i7 platform with decent overclock on the processor to eliminate the processor limitations as much as possible. The W3520 is equivalent to i7 920. These are identical chips in every way. The Xeons are usually better binned product. Other than that, there is no difference between i7 920 and W3520.
How we tested
It was very clear from the beginning, that usual testing methods we adopt here are not going to work. The specification themselves made it very clear that this card will not be able to compete against anything other than low end 9400GS/GT counterpart.
So we had to improvise. I basically tried to get the playable settings for this game. So this review will at least give you an idea at what settings you will be able to play the game with acceptable performance.
[BREAK=Playable game settings and Results.]
Playable game settings and Results.
I tested the game with the usual set of benchmarks with exception of STALKER. Even with minimal settings, the game was almost unplayable and un enjoyable on this card. The STALKER stuttering was bad enough to miss simple shots.
None of the games were playable with any AA or AF settings. So it was left off for all games.
Results
As you can clearly see, the card really struggles even at low settings in most games at modest resolution of 1280x1024.
This is not surprising seeing the specifications.
3DMark Vantage
3DMark Vantage also yielded poor results scoring less than 800 points for performance preset.
[BREAK=Video Playback]
This is the most important function of this card. And it does not disappoint here.
It played all content I had flawlessly. HD content was played back as it should. The HDMI audio out worked as advertised and gave 7.1 channel output.
There is nothing to complain about in this department. The GPU acceleration was definitely working for all videos including x264 and WMV HD content.
Here is a sample screenshot of 1080P x264 playback CPU usage. Almost all work is offloaded to the GPU.
[BREAK=Temperature, Power Usage and Conclusion]
Temperature and Power Usage
The card never really ran hot. It idled in the high 30s range and peaked at 66C even with its tiny heatsink. So its all good in this department.
To test the power usage, I borrowed a APC 1KVA UPS and tested system load using Fur render. At idle the entire setup was eating just 167Watts. And under full load the system was pulling 275Watts which is not bad at all for such highly overclocked system.
My HD 4670 pulls 35Watts more at peak in the same system.
Conclusion
The Geforce 210 is not exactly regular high profile card release from Nvidia. And to be honest, even if you are a casual gamer, you will be wondering what was the point of this card.
The gaming performance is poor, it does not have any exceptional features that competition does not have. In fact HD3400 series had same features and it was released more than a year back.
An year old HD4670 will put this card to shame in gaming and similarly priced 9500GT will outperform this card. So it makes one wonder why Nvidia wanted to achieve from this?
The only logical conclusion is that they wanted to offer something which they didnt in the past. They did not have a chip which was suitable as a all in one solution for HTPC setup. All their previous cards had to rely on onboard sound solution to output sound through HDMI. This card fixed that and also eats less power than their other cards in same price range.
This can also be a test card from Nvidia to see how 40nm manufacturing pans out for them in the near future.
But at the back of the mind, I cant shake the feeling that they are too little too late to the party.
XFX Geforce 210 does make an attractive HTPC solution. It will in the end boil down to what users want in their system. If you need a low power graphics card which does fits even in low height mATX / HTPC cases without breaking bank, this does looks like an attractive solution. But if you want a card which will offer a decent gaming performance, look at other options.
Indicative Market Price : Rs.2950/- From Rashi Peripherals.
My score card
Features : 6.5/10
Performance : 5/10
Value For Money : 7/10
Overall : 6/10
Thanks to XFX and Rashi Peripherals for sending me early review sample.
Please Digg this review here : XFX Geforce 210 Review
..but not a worthy card imo and 3k for this:|.