NVIDIA has finally moved onto their 40nm chipset graphics cards. The first of the lot, the GT 220 that we received from Palit, is their Sonic Edition that comes with a 512MB GDDR3 RAM. As it is the sonic edition, it runs on a slightly amped up frequency of 650 MHz graphics clock and 1415 . MHz shader clock. The card has a basic heatsink with a small and siler'lt fan for cooling. It comes with a DVI, D-sub as well as an HDMI port onboard. Thanks to the new architecture and 40nm technology, the card runs extremely cool at 32 degrees at idle and goes upto 48 degrees on load.


The new card comes with Direct Compute and DirectX 10.1 support as well as HDMI 1.3. We ran our standard benchmarks to test the performance of the card and in the 3DMark06 and PCMark05 synthetic benchmarks, the card scored a surprising 7947 3Dmarks and 8774 PCMarks. In game performance, the card gave an outstanding 70FPS in Far Cry 2 with medium settings and 89FPS in Street Fighter 41 Tests were done on an AMD Phenom II 955 processor on a MSI 790FX motherboard with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. The card clearly outperforms the ATI 4670 as well as NVIDIA 9600GSO cards. Compared to the XFX 9600GSO, which was our 'Value for Money' winner in the July Shootout, the card scores 50% higher in Far Cry 2. Overall, ideal for consumers who are into casual gaming and HD videos.