Sparkle GeForce 210 1GB Video Card Review

Installation

Test Rig:
Intel Atom 330 processor
ASRock A330ION nVidia MCP7A-ION Mini-ITX Motherboard
Thermaltake Element Q Mini-ITX case w/220 watt PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit

I wish I had an off-the-shelf rig to use for a test rig, but I didn’t have one available. This board has integrated geForce 9400 graphics, so I thought it might be interesting to compare the 210 to the newest geForce integrated graphics. Another interesting aspect is that during testing I found the Atom’s “processing power” to be similar to that of an AMD Athlon 64 3200+, the cutting edge technology of five years ago. You may laugh, but I saw some HP rigs on the shelf with that very processor just last year. So placing this video card in my Atom rig, which I found to be pretty weak in the graphics department, is a logical move.

Installation is the easiest, just pop it in a PCI-E x16 slot, no additional power needed. nVidia’s recommdation is a minimum 300 watt power supply, but as the Atom draws a max of 8 watts, rather than the 50-130 watts that most CPUs are I felt that power supply should have plenty of power.

Testing
Since neither the GeForce 210 nor the integrated graphics are intended for extreme 3D gaming, I saw no need to run any gaming benchmarks other than Futuremark. I ran Cinebench10 more as a control to make sure that the other performance of the system was not affected by the video card.