Introduction

NVIDIA recently released their first two 40 nanometer GPUs: the GT216 and GT218. While the GT216 is used on the more powerful GeForce GT 220, the GT218 graphics processor is used for the GeForce 210, the product name is not GeForce G 210, the "G" in G 210 stands for GeForce.

NVIDIA's GeForce 210 is positioned as the new lowest-end graphics accelerator from NVIDIA with specs that will barely suffice for any serious gaming. On the remaining features NVIDIA scores well however. The cards support full Windows Aero acceleration, full HD video decode in the GPU, come with native HDMI output, and are DirectX 10.1 compliant. NVIDIA's favourite technologies CUDA and PhysX are available as well. Only DirectX 11 is missing to complete the list of features, but for the GeForce 210's performance class and at this date DirectX 11 support does not matter much.

Inno3D has taken NVIDIA's reference PCB design and added their own cooler.

Packaging

Inno3D uses a fairly compact package, but the package is bigger than just the graphics card itself. For a low-end graphics card, the package size can help make a difference when shipping tens of thousands of graphics cards. The white sticker on the package looks a bit out of place, but it communicates the most important product specs.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Manual

The Card

The most prominent feature of Inno3D's GeForce 210 is that it is a low-profile card, which makes it an excellent choice for small form factor systems and Media PCs.


The card is exactly one slot tall.


The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and an 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 cards to the big screens without any adapter cables or converters. Please note that you can remove the slot cover metal and the VGA port to get a truly low-profile graphics card.

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.