NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 220: 40nm and DX10.1 for the Low-End
by Ryan Smith on October 12, 2009 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
As we mentioned earlier in this article, since NVIDIA is not shipping cards to reviewers, we do not have a traditional stock unit; and this is compounded by the vast array of speeds vendors can and are offering cards. For the purposes of our testing, we are clocking our Palit GT 220 Sonic Edition to 635MHz core, 1360MHz shader, 900MHz memory, and calling that our stock GDDR3 GT 200. The results should be close to where most of the GDDR3 GT 220s end up.
Meanwhile the 9600GSO we’re using is one of the original G92 based models, which means it has 96SPs, and is clocked at 550Mhz/1375MHz/800MHz, with 384MB of GDDR memory, all on a 192-bit bus. This is not to be confused with the poorly named 9600GSO 512, which is 48 shaders at higher clock speeds and a 128bit bus. It’s this latter 9600GSO that the GT 220 is expected to compete with. Unfortunately we were not able to acquire a 9600GT in time for this review, so this is the next-lowest NVIDIA card that we have on hand to use in our comparison.
Finally, the Radeon 4670 we’re using is a 512MB, 1000MHz memory model. They come as low as 800MHz.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
ATI Radeon HD 5870 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Ryan Smith - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
I don't have that information at this moment. However this is very much the wrong card if you're going scientific work for performance reasons.apple3feet - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link
Well, as a developer, I just need it to work. Other machines here have TESLAs and GTX280s, but a low end cool running card would be very useful for development machines.I believe that the answer to my question is that it's 1.2 (i.e. everything except double precision), so no good for me.
jma - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
Ryan, if you run 'deviceQuery' from the Cuda SDK, it will tell you all there is to know.Another goodie would be 'bandwidthTest' for those of us who can't figure out the differences between various DDR and GDDR's and what the quoted clocks are supposed to imply ...
vlado08 - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
My HD 4670 idles in 165MHz core and 249,8MHz memoy clock and GPU temps 36-45 degrees(passively cooled) as reported by GPU-Z 0.3.5 Is there a possibility that your card didn't lower it's clock during idle?vlado08 - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
My question is to Ryian of course.Ryan Smith - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
Yes, it was idling correctly.KaarlisK - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
The HD4670 cards differ.I've bought three:
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=Z9qnCFnOUNDM...">http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=Z9qnCFnOUNDM...
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Products_O...">http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/VGA/Products_O...
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=g6LDXHUo0EzV...">http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=g6LDXHUo0EzV...
The first one would idle at 0.9v.
The second would idle at 1.1v. When I edited the BIOS for lover idle voltages, I could not get it to be stable.
The third one turned out to have a much cheaper design - not only did it have slower memory, it had no voltage adjustments and idles at 1.25v (but the correct idle frequency).
vlado08 - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
Are GT 220 capable of DXVA decoding of h.264 at High Profile Level 5.1?And videos wiht more than 5 reference frames. Because ATI HD4670 can only do High Profile (HiP) Level 4.1 Blu-ray compatible.
Also what is the deinterlacing on GT 220 if you have monitor and TV in extended mode? Is it vector adaptive deinterlacing?
These questions are important for this video card because it is obvious that it is not for gamer but for HTPC.
On HD 4670 when you have one monitor then you have vector adaptive deinterlacing but if you have two monitors or monitor and TV and they are in extended mode then you only have "bob" deinterlacing.
I'm not sure if this is driver bug or hardware limitation.
Ryan Smith - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
I have another GT 220 card due this week or early next. Drop me an email; if you have something I can use to test it, I will gladly try it out. I have yet to encounter anything above 4.1 though; it seems largely academic.MadMan007 - Monday, October 12, 2009 - link
So my inner nerd that just has to know is confused. Are these truly GT200-based or G9x-based? Different sources say different things. In a way the GT200 series was an improvement on G9x anyway but with enough significant low level changes to make it different. The article calls these GT200 *series* but that could be in name only. It's not clear if that means smaller process cut down die GT200-based or added feature G9x-based.Inquiring nerds want to know!