Final Words and Verdict

The Verdict

For a budget card the GT 220 obviously offers decent value for money. You get plenty of connectivity on the Palit GeForce GT 220 Sonic Edition, silent cooling and a product that offers an excellent desktop usage experience.

Gaming wise cards like these are far from what I can call exciting, of course you are on Guru3D.com and we crave the need for high-end hardware. And as such we might be a little BIAS to a product like shown today. Also our test methodology is designed in such a way that mainstream and faster cards are way more representable in performance scaling. The GT 220 competes well with the Radeon HD 4650 but we do recommend you to look into the Radeon HD 4670 as it outperforms this product at roughly the same price. Then again, if you are into gaming .. we doubt you are even looking at this card as a viable option as you'd be compromising consistently on image quality.

Fact remains that with 48 shader cores in the lower resolution you will be able to play modern games as long as you turn of anti-aliasing, forfeit on image quality and resolution. If your intention is just that, then this might be the card for you. Next to that we have to mention the cards good connectivity and thanks to the 40nm fabrication process, really friendly power consumption.

Where do I see a market for a card like this ? Well, generic Windows 7 and Vista usage with Aero enabled and on the HTPC side of things, the card might be interesting as it's cheap, silent and does come with NVIDIA's VP2 video processor, meaning you can accelerate and post process High Definition content. And it is exactly here where the product will shine, as for very little money you can utilize the 48 shader processor cores for post processing in software like Media Player Classis Home theater edition.

So sure, the user base will be very small for the GT220 series, but if it applies to you then Palit might have a nice offering for you. Palit designed a very stable graphics card but most of all, it's really silent. The GeForce GT 220 Sonic Edition sells roughly for just over 60~70 USD which will need to come down towards 50 USD and then, if you are not into serious gaming, it might be the card for you.

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