Nvidia rebrands again

The Geforce 310 just a 210 with a funky 'new' name.

Nvidia continues its infamously successful "hey presto!" rebranding campaign detailing the oddly familiar Geforce 310 graphics card directly on its site.

Note to our readers: We are struggling not to make this an outright rant about naming schemes. Let's play along with the story and see how this turns out.

The Geforce 310 is a plain vanilla OEM graphics card for system builders who think their customers don't know any better, and let's face it, more often than not, that's true. The card is a carbon copy of its predecessor, the Geforce 210, a 589MHz core clock, 1402MHz shader clock and 500MHz memory clock graphics card with 512MB of DDR2 memory on a 64-bit wide bus. Same specs, same feature set, same everything.

These cards are one and the same. Period.

We dug deep to try and understand this, but otherwise came up with nothing. One could think it was spurred by the launch of Windows 7 and some sort of certification programme, but no. Geforce 210 was already Windows 7 certified, even though the spec sheet still reads "Vista-certified". You could say it was a matter of redesigning the card to bring down the bill of materials and improve margins, but heck no. No, wait, making it an OEM card saves Nvidia money on creating a new retail box for the card. Yes, that must be it.

We're beyond understanding the reasons, but consumers might be tricked into thinking that a Geforce G310 graphics card is the hottest thing in town, when what they actually get is Thanksgiving leftovers.

To wrap this up, here's a fun exercise, open two tabs on your browser and go to the G210 and G310 pages. Now flip tabs back and forward. It's like you haven't changed the page, except for a slightly blown-up picture of the otherwise identical card.

One thing can be said for the house of Nvidia, though - tradition is still what it used to be. You can now reliably cross out the first digit on the model number of every low-end through mainstream Nvidia graphics card when making your informed purchase decision.

We would, honestly, love to see something new coming out of Nvidia's shop. We really would, because the last thing the market needs is a lack of competition.