Quick Look: MSI’s GeForce 210

MSI’s N210-MD512H is priced as the ultimate budget card, and it performs accordingly. It’s slower than next-tier cards by a significant amount, but it’s still fast enough that it can at least run every game in our test suite at some level, which is going to be better than what most IGP-based systems can do right now. It goes without saying that you can buy much faster cards even among the limited selection of the low-profile market, but any such card is going to cost a great deal more than $30. So much like the Radeon HD 5450 we took a look at last week, this is a card best suited for buyers moving up from an IGP while needing to do so on a very limited budget.

Looking at our data, we’re a bit surprised that NVIDIA didn’t make the reference G210 design a passively cooled card. Based on MSI’s use of a double-wide heatsink, G210 is plenty suitable for passive operation and likely even a single-wide operation with some care. For a card like the G210, we can’t think of any good reason to use a cooler with a fan if there’s enough room in a computer to use a card with a heatsink. To that end MSI’s G210 looks to be one of the best G210 cards available since it’s one of the only ones with a passive cooler.

We do have a single disappointment though, and that’s for HTPC use. We’re less concerned about the audio limitations (let’s be fair, this card launched back in the summer of 2009) as we are the results of our video test. We weren’t expecting to get great quality out of an entry-level card but we were expecting it to at least fall back gracefully on deinterlacing. The fact that it’s the only card that can’t at least do something smoothly on the Cheese Slices test is disheartening.

Finally, it’ll be interesting to see what NVIDIA does to replace the G210 late this year. It’s reasonable to assume that GF100 will cascade down in to a part similar to G210, which will be a definite benefit for NVIDIA since it means they can bring complete audio bitstreaming to a card at this price point. What we’re left wondering is how they’re going to do this: do they do a 40nm GF100 derivative, or do they push the envelope some and do a 28nm part.

Since G210 is already based on 40nm, a GF100 derivative is ultimately going to be bigger than the GT218 GPU which makes it harder to offer a card at $30. A 28nm GPU would presumably let them pack in GF100/DX11 functionality without expanding the die, but a 28nm product this year is ultimately going to be dependent on how well Global Foundries’ 28nm process is coming along.

Of course we’ll first have to see how GF100 does when it finally launches next month…