Palit GT220 Graphics Card review

NVIDIA has finally moved onto their 40nm chip set graphics cards. The first

of the lot, the GT 220 we received from Palit is their Sonic Edition that comes

with 512MB GDDR3 RAM. This, being the Sonic Edition, runs on a slightly amped up

frequency of 650 MHz graphics clock and 1415 MHz shader clock. The card has a

basic heatsink with a small and silent fan for cooling. It comes with a DVI,

D-sub as well as an HDMI port onboard. Thanks to the new architecture and 40nm

technology, the card runs extremely cool at 32 degrees at idle and goes upto 48

degrees on loads.

The new card comes with Direct Compute and DirectX 10.1 support as well as

HDMI 1.3. We ran our standard benchmarks to test the performance of the card and

in the 3DMark06 and PCMark05 synthetic benchmarks, the card scored a surprising

7947 3Dmarks and 8774 PCMarks. In games performance, the card gave an

outstanding 70FPS in Farcry2 in medium settings and 89FPS in Street Fighter 4.

These tests were done on an AMD Phenom II 955 processor running on a MSI 790FX

motherboard with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The card clearly outperforms the ATI 4670 as

well as NVIDIA 9600GSO cards in terms of gaming performance. Compared to XFX

9600GSO which was our entry level Value for Money winner in July Shootout, the

card scores 50% higher in Farcry 2.

Bottomline: It's great for consumers who are into casual gaming and

require a card for more of high def multimedia usage.