GeForce GT 220 review - Introduction

Palit GeForce GT 220 Sonic Edition -- NVIDIA has launched their first 40nm product this week, it's called the GeForce GT 220, a low-budget solution originally intended for the OEM market. The geForce GT 220 offering will be available for roughly 50 to 60 USD.

Actually I have to refine the introduction a little as it's not one product, yet two that NVIDIA has released in this market segment, the NVIDIA GT220 and GT210. Today we'll look at the GeForce GT 220 from Palit. But let's quickly peek at the reference specifications.

First the value-oriented G210, which will ship with 16 stream processors clocked at 1402 MHz, while the graphics core operates at 590 MHz. It's armed with 512MB of DDR2 running at 790MHz. The board's memory interface is just 64-bit, with peak memory bandwidth of 12.6GB/sec. The GT210 cards will supposedly sell for $30-$35 and replace today's GeForce 9400 in NVIDIA's lineup. We are however testing the Palit GeForce GT 220. And within this extreme budget range, it actually does pack some power. Next to an upgrade to being DX 10.1 compatible the shader cores have been increased to 48.

GeForce GT220's (reference model) ships with 48 shader processors clocked at 1360MHz and 625MHz graphics core clock. Opposed to the 64-bit wide memory controller on the GT 210 the memory interface is 128-bit wide and runs at 800MHz. The GPU used is the new 40nm GT216 graphics processor. We test the Sonic Edition, which comes pre-overclocked:

The DDR2 memory size on this card is 512MB and you can expect a sales price of roughly 50 USD. This SKU is intended to replace the GeForce 9500 family, adding more shader processor performance.

Head on over to the next page where we'll look into some photo's of Palit's offering after we'll dive straight into the benchmark session to see what the GT 220 has to offer.