Like being nudged with a pinky toe.
If you've ever been to the beach at the time of the year when it's almost hot enough to go for a swim, but the water is still quite cool, and seen someone attempting to enter the water a toe at a time - then you'll come pretty close to what this card is like. It runs towards the specification box with all the excitement and glee of a sixteen year old driving on their own for the first time, but as soon as it touches the murky depths of serious hardware, it retreats faster than a French general in command of a janitorial squad tasked with cleaning up after the apocalypse.
Running inside this card is the GT216, a core manufactured on a slim 40nm process that is a relatively small 100mm2 in size. With only 48 stream processors and a now-ancient 128-bit memory bus, the 1GB of GDDR3 memory is one of the few saving graces of this card. What also helps keep the card afloat is the factory overclock that's been applied to the core, an increase to 720MHz (95 over reference), though memory speeds only receive a teensy boost and sit at 800MHz. In all, nothing too exciting, with a price only a few bucks shy of the GT240 - a card with double the stream processors.
Physically this card is pretty standard low-end fare, offering HDMI, DVI and VGA connectivity in a dual-slot form factor. The PCB is a slightly deeper blue than traditional GIGABYTE colours, but is pretty short and will fit in pretty much every case out there. The heatsink that cools the core is as simple as they come, consisting of a large lump of aluminium that has been strapped to the card, complete with large fan. There's a plastic shroud around the card that guides airflow somewhat, and though the heat is not exhausted outside the case, it really isn't a problem with a maximum TDP rating of 58W (though this will be slightly higher thanks to the factory OC).
This was reflected in the idle temperatures of the card, at only 32 degrees with 53.5dBA generated. Load temperatures were excellent, at a max of 39 degrees and a slightly quieter 52.9dBA afforded by a small fanspeed increase that resulted in smoother air movement. There are no SLI nipples to be found on this card, and it can't be run in SLI mode through the PCIe bus, though you'd be mad to bother. At least power isn't an issue, with everything the card needs piped in through the PCIe slot.
What flows back out of the card isn't very impressive, with gaming performance in Crysis proving that ultra-high-res is nigh-on impossible, and GRID proving completely unplayable. 3DMark06 netted a decent score, if we'd entered into a time machine and tested it two years ago, but by today's standards it is pretty pathetic. 3DMark Vantage shows much the same story, with the GT220 failing to impress.
Even when we overclocked the core to a max of 794MHz (+74MHz) and the memory to 843MHz (+43MHz) we could only generate a maximum 3dMark06 score of 8528. Once again, the disappointingly low tech specs are getting in the way, and there's not enough processing grunt here to justify paying this kind of price - especially with the GT240 and 5670 out there.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012