Reviews - Inno3D GeForce GT 220: something new from NVIDIA?

[HEXUS]

NVIDIA gives the low-end a makeover, we take a look.

Read more.

[Zak33]

sort out a speed adjustable fan and keep it sub £50 and it's a goer

With 3 different outputs, plenty of frame buffer and IF it were near silent, it'll cater for loads of desk top PC's, for photo's and video work.

The tiny 210 interested me too, to replaceolder onbaord video on mobo's for under the telly in the living room, and playing The Sims on.

[SiM]

Useless for a HTPC, it doesn't support bitstreaming of HD audio over HDMI, like the ATI 5XXX series does.

[OilSheikh]

GDDR2. Blew up any interest I had.

[MadduckUK]

But are the cards necessary? And forgive us for even suggesting such a thing, but with specifications so closely matched, why not just rebrand the GeForce 9400 GT and GeForce 9500 GT as GeForce 200-series products?

funny you should say that

[scaryjim]

As mentioned by OilSheik, the Inno3D card you've linked to at ebuyer is the DDR2 version with memory running at an effective 800MHz, *not* the DDR3 version. The massively reduced memory bandwidth is bound to significantly reduce performance. The cheapest DDR3 GT220 I can find from the "usual" (in these forums, anyway ) preferred etailers is this Gigabyte from Scan, which is also pre-overclocked and has a big chunky non-reference cooler. A quick google suggests that they can be picked up from around £50 inc vat, but at that price they should be compared to a HD4670, which has a significant performance advantage over the 4650... while this is an interesting review of the new NVidia card (a review I'd been hoping for for a while, tbh, as I'm quite interested in the GT220) it's simply not comparing the right products...

EDIT: A further prod of Google has shown that a Palit 512MB DDR3 version can be had from a variety of etailers starting at ~ £46, which makes it more comparable to the 4650 (and reducing the frame buffer shouldn't affect gaming performance @ those resolutions). That still doesn't change the fact that the link in the article is misleading though...

[Tarinder]

As usual, we appreciate the comments, folks.

Pre-launch pricing is such that we have to make a decision to compare cards at least a week in advance of actual availability. Our best intel at the time suggested a price of under £50 for a GDDR3 version, putting it closer to the HD 4650 than HD 4670.

Seeing as it's played out differently, we'll test a Radeon HD 4670 and then add its results to the graphs. Expect to see them up in a day or so's time. I will bump this thread once the results have been added.

[scaryjim]

Pre-launch pricing is such that we have to make a decision to compare cards at least a week in advance of actual availability.

I'm intrigued now: how long ago was this review carried out? The GT220 has been available in a wide variety of etailers for several weeks - perhaps even as long as a month? How do I know? I've been tracking availability as I'm in the middle of a folding build and NVidia GPUs have a good reputation for it. A new 48core low-end card sounded good but the price (IMNSHO, at least ) was too close to the 9600GT to justify it - at least until I found that Palit card at < £50.

Seeing as it's played out differently, we'll test a Radeon HD 4670 and then add its results to the graphs. Expect to see them up in a day or so's time. I will bump this thread once the results have been added.

Thanks for your honesty and input Tarinder, I was praising the responsiveness of Hexus staff in another thread over the weekend, and once again you've proved you're the tech site that goes the extra mile

[chis]

None of these have passive cooling? Why bother, then?

[Zhaoman]

Passively cooled and £40 would make me interested but I'm not planning to upgrade the onboard graphics on my mum's PC till next summer so hopefully the 5 series equivalent would be out then? Then I'd have more options.

[Tarinder]

Chaps,

We have now tested and added the Radeon HD 4670's numbers to the graphs and to the HEXUS.bang4buck page.

As a result, the conclusion has changed slightly and so has the score attributed to the GeForce GT 220.

Apologies for not getting the comparisons spot-on the first time around, but we've updated it as soon as possible.

[laywill]

The GT 220 looks to be an interesting card for a HTPC build, but it might be worth either getting one with a passive / quiter cooler prefitted or to fit a big passive one yourself.

I was also surprsied by the amount of overclocking headroom which has been left on the cards with the reference (and what looks to be frankly pretty poor) cooler. This definately makes it worth overclocking, or setting up nVidia control panel to dynamically overclock it under load.

As a note to Hexus: Why the shift from percentage ratings to x/10 ratings? I far preferred the old percentage ratings, just because its more accurate and lets you get a better idea for how products compare.

[scaryjim]

Thanks Tarinder - that makes a very interesting read indeed and I appreciate the time you've put into updating the review. The first ET:QW graph made me raise 3/4 of an eyebrow, but the rest of the review looked pretty much as I expected.

Back to the drawing board for my next build, I think... *sigh*

[SiM]

Useless for a HTPC, it doesn't support bitstreaming of HD audio over HDMI, like the ATI 5XXX series does.

The GT 220 looks to be an interesting card for a HTPC build

See my previous post. It's only interesting if you want a fail when you want to play HD audio

[laywill]

See my previous post. It's only interesting if you want a fail when you want to play HD audio

Touché. Considering I read the whole thread, that is something of a fail on my part.