Introduction

Currently NVIDIA is releasing new versions of their lower end graphics card series. All new cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the GT216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the GT218 processor. Both cards are positioned in the lower end of the performance spectrum, with performance in the 9500 GT range. This is also the first time that NVIDIA offers a DirectX 10.1 compliant GPU. NVIDIA's Reviewers Guide states "The GeForce GT 220 is the perfect GPU for Microsoft Windows 7". I respectfully disagree, a Windows 7 graphics card should have support for DirectX 11 in my opinion, no matter if DirectX 11 is popular yet. NVIDIA has also worked on the media PC features and now lets you transmit the HDMI audio signal through the PCI-Express bus without the need for any SPDIF cable. Full HD video decode acceleration, NVIDIA CUDA and PhysX are also present on this card making this an all-round entry level solution if you are looking for a basic graphics card that works well for desktop use, and allows for casual gaming.

Most of you have probably never heard of Axle 3D before. They are located in Hong Kong and manufacture NVIDIA graphics cards. With a monthly capacity of about 200k cards they are a very well established graphics card vendor for the Asia Pacific Region, but they also have offices in Germany and Dubai.

Axle's GeForce GT 220 comes with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory and features NVIDIA's reference clock speeds. They have customized the PCB design and cooling solution to fit their needs in order to provide a competitive and cost effective solution.

Packaging

Axle's packaging shows all the important product highlights on the front while the back goes into more detail about what you can do with their GeForce GT 220.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Manual

The Card

Axle has chosen to go with a black PCB design and a cooler from Arctic Cooling which promises to deliver a quiet experience.


While all components on the card, including the slot cover, are only one slot tall, the Arctic Cooling heatsink makes this a dual slot card.


The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and one HDMI port. For a low-end graphics card, this is a very reasonable output configuration since many low-end PC users still use CRTs. For media PC users the HDMI output enables an easy way to hook up their graphics card to the big screen without any adapter cables or converters.
As mentioned before, NVIDIA has slightly changed how their HDMI Audio works. Instead of connecting an SPDIF output from your sound card to the graphics card, the driver will route the audio signal from the sound device over the PCI-Express bus into the graphics card. According to NVIDIA "fully uncompressed 7.1 LPCM" is supported, as far as I know the sound card will take care of decoding the audio from other formats into LPCM. Please note that you will still need an onboard sound device or sound card. Unlike ATI graphics cards there is no complete sound device embedded inside the GPU.


While there are no SLI connectors, it is possible to put two of these cards in SLI mode for better performance and data will be transferred via the PCI-Express bus.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.