Introduction

Today NVIDIA releases their new GeForce GT 220 and GeForce G 210 graphics cards. Both cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the G216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the G218 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.

Palit has engineered their own GeForce GT 220 designs, which allows for better cost optimizations than using NVIDIA's reference design. In addition to that the card tested here is the Palit GeForce GT 220 Sonic which means that it comes with faster clocks out of the box.

While it is possible to make a card with 1 GB of video memory, we are testing Palit's 512 MB version today, which comes with higher clocks out of the box. Please also check out our other review today of the Zotac GeForce GT 220 1 GB here.

Packaging

Palit uses a small cardboard package that is just big enough to house the graphics card. Such a move definitely helps with the shipping costs which can help make a difference when shipping tens of thousands of graphics cards. While I find the package design a bit dull, the front shows all the important product information, with more detail on the back.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Manual

The Card

Palit has designed their own PCB layout for the GeForce GT 220. On the back you can see four empty solder pads which would accomodate additional memory chips for the 1 GB version.


The card's heatsink is a little bit taller than one slot, which means that you need two empty slots in your computer.


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.