NVIDIA's new GeForce 210 Series is as good a card as it is bad. These low-end cards come with a super-power-efficient new 40 nm core, that is also tiny, which means it is extremely cheap to make for NVIDIA. While added support for DirectX 10.1 feels more like a feature that looks good on the packaging and specs sheets, the native HDMI output and improvements to HDMI audio can really make a difference for media PC users or anyone who wants to connect the card to his big TV screen. Even though "DirectX 10.1" and "PhysX" would suggest that this card is for gaming, it is not. The GeForce 210 can barely run any fairly-recent game at 1024x768, even though you may achieve playable framerates by sacrificing most of the details settings.
On the other hand these cards run Windows Aero just fine and offer acceleration for HD video decoding. Another nice property that we found in this review is the massive overclocking potential of the card - we gained over 50% real-world performance. But then, even at 50% more frames per second, the frame rates are still too low to be considered playable.

The massive fan noise is a serious issue for me, in both my desktop and Media PC I want quiet components, and here the Inno3D GeForce 210 does not deliver at all. The fan is equally noisy in both idle and load. Part of the reason behind that is Inno3D did not put any temperature-based fan control mechanism on their card, so the fan will always run at the same speed. The selected speed also seems a bit high considering we saw load temperatures of only 50°C. On the other hand if you only do desktop work and media playback, and never game, you can just unplug the fan and the heatsink will keep the card within safe levels.

With a launch price of $49, it will be hard for this card to compete feature and performance wise with the offerings of both NVIDIA and ATI. The only real improvements it brings to the table, and that matter, are the considerably reduced power consumption and the HDMI audio changes. I am confident however that NVIDIA will soon reduce the price of these cards to be competitive with similar products in the market.