I was gonna say it might be acceptable for Windows XP, but then I remembered you can still buy a new or lightly used GT710 for the same kind of money, and that will blow the 210 out of the water.
@@skraegorn7317 you could buy a 730 with gddr5 for the same price. Though I'd say just get a 750 (ti or not, whatever) for xp. You'd run literally everything at no less than 60fps if you're doing a retro rig
@@skraegorn7317 Or you could get a Ryzen CPU that has a Vega, which is considerably better than even a 710. Of course, that is only valid if you're basically building a machine from scratch.
I had a Gigabyte DDR3 variant of this card. I managed to basically max out the sliders in MSI afterburner before it black screened and never posted again.
Very few people understand GT210 success story. It was lowest tier Nvidia card, and as it became standard for this segment, it could run games released 5 years prior with low-ish settings. But gaming was not its selling point, playing compressed video was ! It was among first budget cards that could run compressed video clips at 1080p , which was a huge deal when it was released. DivX was a king in those years, most clips were encoded with H.264 and GT210 had hardware decoding for that - instead of relying on your (weak) CPU . Suddenly you had completely usable multimedia machine alongside usual office tasks.
It sits in that specific low performance bracket that is just barely good enough to run a screen and show video. Stuff like the GT 420/520, GT 610/710, GT 620, HD 4550, HD 5450, HD 6450, R5 230, etc Performance at the lowest end hasn't really progressed over the last decade. The fact that they still produce cards on the performance level of the 8800 GT that I bought used more than a decade ago is astonishing.
@@HappyBeezerStudios To be fair, GT 210 runs 1080p videos without problem . 710 would run 4K but at 30 FPS (Hz) which is good enough for movies etc ... Lots of people simply do not game. What is presently killing this lowest end market is advance of integrated graphics. Even UHD 630 could run 4K videos and more and more powerful CPUs came with iGPU which was not a thing in the past.
@@aleksazunjic9672 UHD can even run more modern games. as long as you don't push the settings high most game will run 1080*720 with low to medeium settings. *actually a accomplishment from intel at the time. Can't wait to se what arc actually brings to the table if they can manage it for at least 4 years and have a few good cards and decent drivers pushed out.... last time intel did dedicated was ahem yeah >.>
One time the office got a new PC, we asked Dell not to include the GT730 because the intel 9th gen iGPU is better. You know what? Those bastards still included it with the $80 price tag. 4k 60fps videos from an iPhone does not play, removing the GT730 fixed it. And that was before the GPU prices went crazy, for that money you could have gotten a second hand RX470 or GTX970
I've had this card for almost my entire childhood. Thankfully I've upgraded since then...to a Quadro 2000 I love living in Eastern Europe 2023 update: I am now the proud owner of a 6800 XT
To be fair, I think people who use it today just need a display adapter. Yes, you could get a much more powerful GPU for $15, like you could pick up a mid 00s near top-tier GPU. It will play Fable and HL2 better, but it will not support the latest APIs.
Can confirm this. Currently running a MSI 210 as my current GPU in my build, paired along with 4 GBs of DDR3 ram at 1333 mhz and i3 3220. Not the worst configuration possible, but boy, that 2 sticks of memory that I've got and that 210 are two massive buggers that keep me preventing from playing older titles from the early-mid 00's. I can't wait to finally get rid of this awful GPU and get a Maxwell Titan X or a 980 TI, so that I will FINALLY be able to play most of the newer titles from 2006/2007 onwards at 1080p or 1440p settings.
@@harryshuman9637 But neither does the 210 :D That is a DX10 card with no support for Vulkan, HEVC/h.265 or vp9, it lacks driver support for years. (the latest one is from 2016) It requires hd264ify to even accelerate youtube! In fact, a mid 00s top tier GPU would be something from the same lineup like a 9800 GT or GTX 260, which won't have hardware acceleration for those codecs or DX11/12 either, but but least they would play the old games better. This is still a mid 00s card, just a low-end one.
i was one of the unhappy owners of this cursed GPU, used it from 2016 to 2020, when i bought a RX 580 8GB, to finally get my self rid of this old curse
@pankoza2 once Nvidia can find a way to separate their extra features and hardware that are useful for software engineers and scientists from certain GPU's then give the savings to the average consumer GPU then it won't be that way but they won't. And that's why AMD will always be praised even if they are always 1 step behind with GPU's, also Radeon software is just straight up better to use.
I used to play warband and fallout 3 on this exact card, with a pentium dual e4something and 1 gig of ddr2 667. It was an lga775 chip, and I swapped it for a e6700, 4gb of low density ddr2 800, and a r7 250 later on and it ran so much better on windows 7.
Oh dude this card was my first ever GPU, my dad got it for me and I had a prebuilt Dell Optiplex running only Intel Integrated Graphics. Needless to say it felt like a huuuge bump in performance even though I couldn’t run games smoothly like AC3, but was I happy kid. Good memories and I have you to thank for making this video on the GT210. Cheers mate
Just as I wrote that this card was called just "GeForce 210", not "GeForce GT 210", you said it in the video.😀 Seems like even nVidia did not dare put the "GT" moniker on it. OTOH, I can see the original purpose of this card, and even the reasons for its success. The Core2 and early Core-i CPUs did not yet have iGPUs. Belive it or not, the majority of people aren't gamers. For cheap, it was either (similarly misearable) chipset graphics or this. Perfectly viable solution for 2D office applications and did even play video reasonably well (for the time).
I bought a BFG (remember those guys?) GTX 280 launch week in 2008. $650, which now is about $900. It was a brilliant card, but even at the time it was considered completely overkill and most didn't buy it. I kept it around a LONG time, but frankly, it's 1gb vram, performance, and DX10 limitations means it aged horribly. So I cannot even fathom living with a GT210. I mean I have to assume even my Intel 2600K I got in 2011 would equal this thing in GPU and decoding power.
Oh man, this is bringing back memories of when me and my step brother tried playing games on a Geforce 9400 back when that was the best GPU I had. I'd gotten it for free, along with most of the other parts I mashed together to give him a PC in 2015 or so. But hay ... it was at least better than the 7300le he had before that, which doesn't have Windows 10 drivers.
There is another Reason why so many Geforce 210 are around. Geforce GTX 480. The first DirectX 11 Geforce Card. It was in so demand that Nvidia forced the retailers to buy 10 Mid-Tier Cards or 100 Low Tier Cards to get one GTX 480 for the first 3-4 Month. And of course the dealers bought the cheapest card which had a full 1080p set on masses, so a lot of Geforce 210 went on the Shelfes, to sell the Highend Cards. The profit on the Low-Tier cars was the same as like on a GTS 250, GTX 260, GTX 465 or GTC 4070 but the risk was far lower.
I found a computer in a dumpster in 2010 at the apartment complex that we were living in at the time. It was a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 6GB of RAM. It was missing the graphics card so I bought the cheapest one I could find which was the Geforce 210. I had no idea that the card was good for watching movies but awful for gaming. This CPU, GPU combo was terrible to say the least. I put up with it for 10 years before getting a free upgrade to an FX8320, Radeon HD 7950 3GB Twin Frozr iii. and 16GB of DDR3 RAM. Been gaming on the FX8320 PC for 2 years now and I'm happy with it.
It reminds me of Pineapple on Pizza, something everyone hates because the Internet told you to when in real life it is not that bad and pretty good. The GT210, 710 and 1030 are all cards like this, they are made for a reason which is NOT gaming, just a display output but because "GAMERS" said you must hate it, everyone hates it. Not everyone wants an RTX 3090 TI in their PC just to watch some TH-cam videos, use Microsoft Word, in a school etc. These cards can do all that easily so a great, cheap and easy choice that uses nearly no power.
I remember the GT 210! It was the very first GPU I bought for the very first computer I built. I played so many Flash games with it, back when I didn't know Steam was around.
LOL, I have one in my current music studio machine with an i5 12400F. A Zotac GT210 Synergy with 512mb of raging DDR2 to be exact. It was in some other computer that we found in a closet when we bought the house and I was like yay spare parts well guess what, in a pinch I ended up needing it and I could not fucking BELIEVE it even worked. Even GeForce Experience was like "DEAR GOD....well....alright then" and downgraded ITSELF to its 2014 build in pity just to find the "latest drivers." A truly sobering experience. I'm sure the card felt like Marty McFly when I coerced it into displaying Windows 11 in modern resolutions. OMG I'm running the future!! With two monitors it flickers like crazy and basically operates like Homer Simpson's dad falling asleep at random times, but it'll do until the i7 with integrated graphics shows up. I thought about trying Crysis for teh lulz but I don't want to blow it up before I'm done transferring all my sessions, plugins and DAW. It is a brutal product and it was a brutal product the day it came out.
I bought one for my work PC at the time so I could watch movies/youtube and play ps1 emulators lmao. I think I paid £15 for it discounted, brand new at a PC World, I went in expecting to pay £40 for a HD5450 so when I saw the battered GT210 box for £15 offering pretty much the same thing as the other card, was a no brainer. Well worth the price for that, it was a job as a night concierge at an apartment building. Me and my colleague got tons of use out of it, it wouldn't run every PS1 game but ran a fair few of them, even MGS. Still wonder if they have the same PC and the card in there.
GT210 is a completely capable card if you choose it's tasks right. Friend of mine couple of years ago had his GPU died, and he bought a brand new GT210 instead, works fine still. He only uses his computer for basic internet tasks and sometimes watching movies.
I remember the GT210 was a very popular card back when releases. Yet I always thought the lowest entry card was always going to be terrible for gaming and only useful for a media type setup.
So this is the first i've heard about it being bad. Not that I disagree, but it's use has been specific. I actually still use the same card today. In college I got it because I just needed a card to run dual monitors out of a slimline desktop PC and didn't do much PC gaming beyond Minecraft (it was in Alpha at the time) or AoE2/Civ4. It ran those fine, and of course played OK video. Today it's in a sleeper "retro" pc I built in an old optiplex case with a system running XP for older games, I used a vista-era Motherboard and a Core2Quad which pushes XP pretty good. The 210 runs a lot of XP-era games pretty well, all things considered. At least, Quake 3 runs fine, and that's most of what I care for, as well as NEC PC98 emulation. That said... anyone know a good old card I could throw in an XP machine to replace it?
Whoa I had this card some 12 years ago, hand me down from a hand-me-down Raytheon desktop PC. Many hours were spent playing Fallout 3/NV, Oblivion, Skyrim, and EVE online with this bad lad, then one day EVE updated the drivers and I couldn't log in anymore :'(
I proudly own a 5450 and a 6450. They are perfect for what you said, video adapters for mobo without integrated graphics (or With poor gma 900/950) that want to decode HD x264/265 (ish)
I wonder what does better today the GT 210 or the HD Radeon 6450. Both are extremely prolific basic display adapters. I personally used a passively cooled 6450 for about 4 years, and it actually met my needs at the time quite well, it had acceptable open drivers on GNU / Linux, was capable enough for composited desktop environments and for running two or three displays. My original intention for it was just for desktop use and basic video consumption, but I did manage to play games on it as well. 800x600 was often playable with it. I actually still keep it around just in case I need display out on something that wouldn't have it otherwise. Oh and it actually runs Stardew Valley, so that's a point in it's favor.
I used a computer with one of these in it until a few months ago. Basically would run TF2 and some older flight sims. Nothing else. I’ve upgraded (violently) to a ryzen 9 and a 6800xt now, not sure how I lived with a gt210 for so long.
Well, once OCed the RAM and Shader Core, I used to play GTA IV, Battlefield 3 and many games like that, even Wolfenstein TNO, at 800×600 30 FPS always everything on low and wiping things like shadows in all the style of what Low Spec Gamer does for fun (but I was forced to do that in order to game). I had one and was one of the 512MB DDR2 models in which the bandwidth of the DDR2 VRAM was always stagnating this poor device.
I have the exact same model, got it for free from a friend who didn't need it, I mean ut's fine for an older system that hasn't got an IGPU, it supports windows 10 and plays videos nicely, has support for multiple monitkrs and mostly a HDMI output. Wouldn't spend more then 5$ on it tbh, glad i got kt fkr free tho, a nice piece of weird history 😀
but as a ex gt210 user myself i loved that card for lite gaming it can play at 200fps minectaft 1.8.9 and 120 on 1.12.2 .it was a amazing card at the games i played at the time
Had this from 2013 to 2014. Then I built a gaming PC with a r9 280x and a cheap FX 4300. Paired with a cheap motherboard. Big upgrade was amazed event though the only expensive part was the GPU.
I am using my GT210 in my Ubuntu Server and it can handle TH-cam in 720p and 1080p reasonbly well and even Dolphin in the GameCube's resolution is possible, maybe it's because of Windows or something
if you want a display adapter in a budget build, just go for iGPU (e.g. UHD 730) nowadays, if my grandparents bought me GT210 now I will feel they got "scammed"
I still have mine mount on a quad core e9400 whit 8 ram xD, and for like 10 years it was the light on the end of the tunel, Devil may cry 4 final fantasy X-X2 remaster and FF 13 eaven COD black ops 1 XD damm what fun memories it have. now is only a server cpu .
The problem is it had broken specs and didn't perform how it should have... and then they repackaged it over and over and over. They did a string of cards like this up to the GeForce GT710. Extremely power and bandwidth starved architecture to the point where ALL it could do was 2D gaming and office work. My ancient GeForce 7600GS could body the 710 and it was a lackluster card SEVEN whole generations before it.
This must have been a UK thing, cause this wasn't a common card in the US. It was more about the gt 710 over here, the card just wouldn't go away and was literally just ewaste.
I honestly wonder if embedded graphics on modern CPUs are actually more powerful? I mean, the Ryzen G models have 8 Vega cores, and the 12600K has a UHD 770 at 1.45Ghz.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial So, according to Passmark, the Intel HD 500 is actually more powerful, which means a $60 Maesto Evolve III has a more powerful GPU...
Yep that was my first graphics card, Bought it in 2010 in a complete build (Who brand new computer, keyboard, mouse, speaker, screen) for 1000€. I probably could have done better for that budget.. but i was 12 years old and didn't know anything
My first laptop had a g103m, probably about as fast as a 210, paired with a t4300 as the cpu. It ran minecraft and other similarly demanding tittles alright so it was fine for me. To be fair it only had to spit out 1366x768 so it's not like it had a massive load on it.
i had the misfortune of owning a gt 210..... hey, at least it ran games from the 90s and early 2000s (Doom, Quake 1 / Quake 3 arena / unreal tournament 99 / morrowind / unreal gold / HeXeN 2 /Heretic 2 etc)
Originally it was cheap replacement for 7300Le (8400gs with 256mb dx10 vs dx9c on 7300Le) than they upgraded it few times till gt210 perfection. Reminds me on gforce2 story with gforce2 256 that reincarnated few times till MX4000
Yeah, the card is bad. But it wasn't as obsolete on release as the FX 5200! (The 5200 Ultra was fine tho) or GT 710 The thing with the GT 210 is, that they kept making the card, that people kept putting them into OEM machines. All the "HD ready" idea with it was fine. It did that just fine. It could decode video. But interesting that you found a graphics card that won't be bottlenecked by a Pentium 4. In terms of performance, for DX9 gaming I'll stay with my 7300 GT or with the HD 4870 I upgraded to later. Or if I want a funny low end card, the GT 420 exists.
well back in 2013 i really had no money of my own so i had to put up with the pc my uncle gifted me. the said pc was wielding a point of view g210 1gb and it was awful like a real nightmare. but still, i played saints row 3 gta 5 assassins creed up to black flag and nfs mw 2012 all in 800*600 low settings. no matter which game, it always had below 30 fps output.
Hey i have a idea! Also try the HD 6670 (preferably the 1Gb GDDR5 version) using the last non- beta drivers compare it to the Amernime drivers.Trust me, you are going to be surprised by the performance difference in some games ( at least i am considering that with the modded drivers it runs world of tanks in full 1080p Low at 80-120 fps even though it wasn't advertised as a 1080p GPU and it also runs genshin impact on 1440x900 which is also a pleasant surprise!)
Wow... you do like to torture yourself to tell a story. Bravo on a great video about a card that makes the 710 look great, makes you long for the powerhouses of 2003, makes you really reconsider modern bottom barrel Intel iGPUs. I enjoyed this, but I felt every moment of the suffering.
@@aleksazunjic9672 No that's the thing, the GT210 was even slower than the 9400GT which it was meant to be replacing. It's probably the worst budget segment graphics card released by nVidia or AMD/ATi. Legit would have been better to just shrink the 9400GT and add in the new video decoder.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I regard the GT210 as worse simply because the FX5200 had an actual use-case - For years it and the FX5500 (Overclocked, die-shrunk version of the FX5200) were the most easily available PCI graphics cards that didn't require any external power when it was still reasonably likely to find PCs without any AGP or PCIe slots and proprietary PSU pinouts, and despite its lacklustre performance it still ran circles around any IGPs in those PCs and most of the other readily available PCI options that didn't require external power at the time. The GT210 even came in PCI as well funnily enough, but by then it was much rarer to find a PC where PCI was the only bus option so it wasn't as useful.
@@TheDemocrab 210 was not direct replacement for 9400Gt (220 could have been) . 210 was cheapest card with hardware decoding h.264 which was huge deal back then. Overall, it was cheaper to produce gt210 in 40 nm process than to continue with 9xxx series in 80 nm process.
I had a 210 for around 5 years as my main GPU when I was 12 years old, I played CS Source, Garry's Mod, Minecraft, TF2 and GTA SA, and other very old games like the first Far Cry. I didn't knew anything about computers at that time so I thought it was amazing, I have to thank that card for making me appreciate games a lot, and since I had to be tinkering so much it eventually leaded me into programming which is now my passion and way of living.
I ran a 710 for the longest time, and I ran EVERYTHING on it. Bendy, Minecraft, editing softwares, a lot of Blender renders, etc. It was a BEAST for what I put it through. :)
@@ChloeVFX I used blender too! I remember also using Cinema4d and things like that. Hahah what a time! Now I have a much powerful GPU but I don't enjoy gaming nearly as much as I did when I had the 210. As I learned about other GPUs, I remember thinking every day how much more fun could I have with a better one, now that I do I wish I was 13 and playing with my 210 again!
thanks to my dad giving me his old gaming computer my test gpu is now a 560 ti. But primarily going to use it in his old computer as a overkill windows xp machine
The actual worst of the worst is indeed an "OEM 210 PCI" It was basically the same as the g100/205 with the added bonus of being capped at 12w TDP instead of 30w due to the PCI (not PCIE nor agp) bus. It was about 20% slower than a 205, came with GDDR2 400 ram and was about 120mzh slower than the 205 on clock and about 300mhz in shader clock. Whats worse is that some OEMs were display locked, so they did work for video decode/encode but nothing else, you couldn't connect any monitor to the vga or dvi despite having them.
Yeah, fits about with the 7900 cards, so 5 years old high end is about it. Which is also why the GT 710 is much worse in comparison. 5 Years before that was, oh not 5 year old highend, but 5 year old midrange with the 9600.
And that was essentially what they were aiming for. A CHEAP card for basic use, that could also play video with hardware acceleration. Offices, schools, people who just wanted to browse the web etc don't need gaming performance. If you wanted a card primarily to play games, they made plenty of those too. It's no different today. A lot of computers have a basic iGPU or low end card for the same reasons.
A few years ago a friend of mine asked for a new graphics card for his birthday (he was playing with integrated graphics on whatever cheep second hand CPU he was using). Long story short his parents bought him a brand new 210 from amazon. When installed in his PC it ran at about half the proformace of his integrated graphics and for fear of his parents being upset we spent about 20 minutes in the bios/random windows settings to disable the card so he didn't have to remove it. The card may be designed to be a display adapter but it is not marketed as such misleading non tech-savy people (such as my friends parents).
Man... The GT 210. I remember in 2009 or something the netcafe near my home received a full upgrade and every PC over there had a GT 210, I remember emulating Megaman X Command Mission on one of the machine using Dolphin and it was soo slow. But people didn't really care about it being powerful or not , the popular games at that time was a counter-strike clone made in Lithtech Jupiter, called Crossfire, the game tend to defaults to low settings and 800x600 resolution out of the box, the attitude was as long as it plays fine it doesn't matter, most people didn't even know what resolution settings were.
In my high school there was a teacher whose office was next to a computer lab and they'd let a bunch of us LAN unreal tournament during lunchtime especially on wet days, I was the only kid who knew you could change the resolution from the default 640x480. Computer lab had 9600Pros in it as it was also used for CAD classes, I cranked those graphics settings :D
I have this card wayback 2010, until my brother swapped it for gt220.. he installed this gt210 on the pc vendo machine he assembled for his customer, i also remember him testing this card playing crysis 1 on the lowest resolution on the lowest possible setting at 8 fps 🤣.. the GT220 he gave to me gives my installed games a little breathing room, i also obtained a copy of crysis 1 and game on 800x600 on low-medium settings at 25-30 fps..
Before even watching the video, let me just type I do appreciate your in-depth insights on tech stuff. It's a nice little history lesson few channels dive into, especially the parts showing contemporary (at the time) reactions to them. That research takes some time both to find and analyze! There are so many versions of the GeForce 210 I have to wonder how awful the best version is. I have one that supposedly has 24 shading units according to GPU-Z which probably isn't right but let me tell ya, even with the extra shaders, GDDR3, and decent clocks... it's still pretty bad in games. As a display adapter... well it works. BUT considering they were still sold new as recent as 2021... terrible. There were and still are far cheaper and better options especially if looking used. I remember wanting one, before I knew what GPU really were for my old Pentium 4 system back in the day.. then I found out the motherboard can't support the GeForce 210s that were available. That's when I knew it was time to upgrade everything!
Honestly, I've bought these as well - these are excellent framebuffers for machines that have CPUs without iGPUs (eg when I do a Ghetto Xeon build with one of those chinesium 'X79' or 'X99' boards). They've got excellent driver support as well, and if it's just to operate an ESXi/Linux/WinServer console this is more than good enough. I know that there are other framebuffers you can abuse for this purpose, but since this card has been around for so long, it's got decent drivers for just about any OS you want to use with it - you can even get it to work in high res/256 colour mode on Win3.11 or NT 3.5
Think of the GT210 as good for 640*480 games up till 2006. This GPU also was in the Nvidia ION and ION2. Basically, this beats a Wii. No, not a Wii U, a Wii.
Around 2010 I ended up with an old first gen Athlon64 X2, since I didn't have any PCIe video cards I ran out and picked up the cheapest one I could find. I was quite horrified to find the 210 was about half the speed of my AGP GeForce 6600 GT, a mid range card from 2004.
Holy crap these are still selling! This is pure madness, although I can see why after that period of stupid prices due to Covid and now inflation hitting. Like you said much more affordable cards out there that are much more powerful, I think I saw a GTX980 in CEX the other day for £125.00.
This card was great when you just needed a display on a system and the mobo didn’t have an output. Of course the pci tridents were always much more preferable.
12:19 I got a rebrand of a HD 6450 (R5 230 which unfunnily works with HD 6450 drivers) which I gave to my friend once I bought myself a decent machine that did not have a Pentium 4 531 with 1GB RAM
11:01 Minecraft is actually a really good and fun game to tweak. I got 1.19 running at 100fps semi-stable on a mobile Core 2 Duo and Intel GMA X3100 graphics, be it on Linux with some shader hacks and low resolution, but it is actually working! The GT 210 should be 65% faster than that (according to UserBenchmark), so it would be really nice to see how well it would perform with those settings :D
That is really good performance. In fact, that is much better than my tests on a Pentium 4/GTX 660 Ti setup. Oh, and userbenchmark is really only good to compare the hardware with itself.
I purchased one of these a few years ago, no not as any kind of gaming card but for a 1080p picture? A lot of cpu's have no inbuilt graphics, you get a problem with your GPU you are fried. I seriously cannot imagine buying this for gaming, but it is excellent for getting a picture output. I love mine as a trusted backup.
I'd like to share a budget build of mine that I'm absolutely giddy over. I got a Dell optiplex 990, old office station. With Intel graphics and 4 GB of slow ram, it got 20 fps in GTA V with below lowest settings. But I added 16 GB of ram, and threw an RX 550 in it, and now I have 60 fps on GTA V, Fallout 4, and CSGO with Medium and High settings at 768p. This is so awesome for me because I've only ever had potatoes before, nothing capable of running these games like this. It was only 150 American Dollars, and with only 8 GB and a more competitively priced Optiplex, one could probably build it for 100.
To be honest, I used to have a PC with no iGPU that I transformed in a NAS/server and I needed some kind of "graphics adapter" because I kept the RTX I had for my newer beast gaming PC. One friend gave me this for the price of a vodka and I'm more than happy with that low end very low power card for what I do with it. Ofc, I tried to "game" on it just for the laughs, and damn, I would never think of this for a gaming PC lol. Meanwhile, it can be a fun thingy for a retro gaming PC... Oh, and BTW, those cards are often raped asf in MSi Afterburner 😂
Honestly i feel like it should be illegal to sell anything with a GPU lower than a 1050 as a "Gaming PC", its literally just misleading marketing to trick someones mom.
the fact that this GPU handles Mount&Blade Warband worse than my Intel integrated GPU from 2013, + the 240p CS:GO made me laugh for quite a while, ngl, it's almost unbelievable that there's a card this worse than an INTEL INTEGRATED GRAPHICS THING, on a LAPTOP, that's only 4 years younger (it's the i3 4005U with it's Intel HD 4400 and now 8GB of RAM btw)
The best case for this card is steamlink. Because it can accelerate h264 I've been able to use an old one for remote play. That also means it can basically be used as terminal for your more powerful PC once you quit big screen
I watched this video at 1080p via a... GT210! 🤣 Needed a new G card, didn't want to spend much, bought this one on eBay for £7 posted and it's done fine. This isn't a gaming PC though, just an old box to watch YT, Netflix, Facebook etc
I remember they were selling "HD gaming" PC's with this POS GPU in them. It's more fun to kill it overclocking it rather than using it for anything. Yes it's harsh, but the truth often is.
A dude build his PC at 2019. His RTX 2060 Super was delayed by Amazon for some issues so, for two weeks he had to use his new Ryzen 5 3600 with a GT 210 for working lmao.
For a video with a poo joke, it's awfully funny that the video URL actually has "Poo" at the end of the URL thanks youtube. 😎
The GT 210 is a crappy card after all
5VvDiIW7Poo = 5 Volt Diluted Windows 7 Poo 🤣
@@Collector123k haha yessss
Question: Is it worse than a HD4350? :D
@@gtasomogyi Probavly about on par. The Nvidia drivers are better than the AMD ones though.
210 as a gaming card is as good as those tiny USB fans as air conditioner.
I was gonna say it might be acceptable for Windows XP, but then I remembered you can still buy a new or lightly used GT710 for the same kind of money, and that will blow the 210 out of the water.
@@skraegorn7317 you could buy a 730 with gddr5 for the same price. Though I'd say just get a 750 (ti or not, whatever) for xp. You'd run literally everything at no less than 60fps if you're doing a retro rig
@@skraegorn7317 Or you could get a Ryzen CPU that has a Vega, which is considerably better than even a 710. Of course, that is only valid if you're basically building a machine from scratch.
@@fluttzkrieg4392 So how are the XP drivers on it?
@@HappyBeezerStudios Not bad, though they work much better if you don't use that as your main OS 21 years after its release.
I had a Gigabyte DDR3 variant of this card. I managed to basically max out the sliders in MSI afterburner before it black screened and never posted again.
Niceeee!
@@SJPretorius000 or not
You probably did a favor to yourself by killing it.
Lmao I did that to my 970 when I got it lol don't drink and oc people
hats off to you for ending one of those abominations
Very few people understand GT210 success story. It was lowest tier Nvidia card, and as it became standard for this segment, it could run games released 5 years prior with low-ish settings. But gaming was not its selling point, playing compressed video was ! It was among first budget cards that could run compressed video clips at 1080p , which was a huge deal when it was released. DivX was a king in those years, most clips were encoded with H.264 and GT210 had hardware decoding for that - instead of relying on your (weak) CPU . Suddenly you had completely usable multimedia machine alongside usual office tasks.
It sits in that specific low performance bracket that is just barely good enough to run a screen and show video.
Stuff like the GT 420/520, GT 610/710, GT 620, HD 4550, HD 5450, HD 6450, R5 230, etc
Performance at the lowest end hasn't really progressed over the last decade. The fact that they still produce cards on the performance level of the 8800 GT that I bought used more than a decade ago is astonishing.
@@HappyBeezerStudios To be fair, GT 210 runs 1080p videos without problem . 710 would run 4K but at 30 FPS (Hz) which is good enough for movies etc ... Lots of people simply do not game. What is presently killing this lowest end market is advance of integrated graphics. Even UHD 630 could run 4K videos and more and more powerful CPUs came with iGPU which was not a thing in the past.
Now imagine modern amd cards dont habe decoding
@@aleksazunjic9672 UHD can even run more modern games. as long as you don't push the settings high most game will run 1080*720 with low to medeium settings. *actually a accomplishment from intel at the time. Can't wait to se what arc actually brings to the table if they can manage it for at least 4 years and have a few good cards and decent drivers pushed out.... last time intel did dedicated was ahem yeah >.>
@@CotyRiddle True. Thus this lowest segment of x10 cards is slowly dying out.
I loathe this card. Every single business PC I’ve seen with a GT210 or GT710 already had a superior iGPU.
One time the office got a new PC, we asked Dell not to include the GT730 because the intel 9th gen iGPU is better.
You know what? Those bastards still included it with the $80 price tag. 4k 60fps videos from an iPhone does not play, removing the GT730 fixed it.
And that was before the GPU prices went crazy, for that money you could have gotten a second hand RX470 or GTX970
oh boy, i'm guessing you don't know gt705 exists do you? gt710 is a monster compared to that turd.
Wanna hear a joke?
I3 10100f paired with gt 710 or 730
@@bitelaserkhalif 5700G paired with GT 710 is even funnier
@@MultiDivebomber That's just one of those cheap gaming PCs on Amazon.
I've had this card for almost my entire childhood.
Thankfully I've upgraded since then...to a Quadro 2000
I love living in Eastern Europe
2023 update: I am now the proud owner of a 6800 XT
i hope you'll be able to get smth better
@@vinylSummer Thanks man, yea, I hope so too
@@wallachia4797 român?
@@angeltzepesh1 da
I see a literal pandemic of people switching from NVidia to AMD GPU's
I had this gpu, back in 2010-2012 and it was ass-tier even back then. To see people use this gpu still is disturbing. Truly an awful gpu.
To be fair, I think people who use it today just need a display adapter.
Yes, you could get a much more powerful GPU for $15, like you could pick up a mid 00s near top-tier GPU. It will play Fable and HL2 better, but it will not support the latest APIs.
Can confirm this. Currently running a MSI 210 as my current GPU in my build, paired along with 4 GBs of DDR3 ram at 1333 mhz and i3 3220. Not the worst configuration possible, but boy, that 2 sticks of memory that I've got and that 210 are two massive buggers that keep me preventing from playing older titles from the early-mid 00's. I can't wait to finally get rid of this awful GPU and get a Maxwell Titan X or a 980 TI, so that I will FINALLY be able to play most of the newer titles from 2006/2007 onwards at 1080p or 1440p settings.
I have 2:)
@@airmicrobe .....why
@@harryshuman9637 But neither does the 210 :D
That is a DX10 card with no support for Vulkan, HEVC/h.265 or vp9, it lacks driver support for years. (the latest one is from 2016) It requires hd264ify to even accelerate youtube!
In fact, a mid 00s top tier GPU would be something from the same lineup like a 9800 GT or GTX 260, which won't have hardware acceleration for those codecs or DX11/12 either, but but least they would play the old games better. This is still a mid 00s card, just a low-end one.
i was one of the unhappy owners of this cursed GPU, used it from 2016 to 2020, when i bought a RX 580 8GB, to finally get my self rid of this old curse
Switching from NVIdia to AMD Graphics is extemely popular now btw.
@pankoza2 once Nvidia can find a way to separate their extra features and hardware that are useful for software engineers and scientists from certain GPU's then give the savings to the average consumer GPU then it won't be that way but they won't. And that's why AMD will always be praised even if they are always 1 step behind with GPU's, also Radeon software is just straight up better to use.
I used to play warband and fallout 3 on this exact card, with a pentium dual e4something and 1 gig of ddr2 667. It was an lga775 chip, and I swapped it for a e6700, 4gb of low density ddr2 800, and a r7 250 later on and it ran so much better on windows 7.
Holy hell, the pc specs sound like my pc specs 5 years ago. Fortunately, i upgraded to a 1060 back then.
Oh dude this card was my first ever GPU, my dad got it for me and I had a prebuilt Dell Optiplex running only Intel Integrated Graphics.
Needless to say it felt like a huuuge bump in performance even though I couldn’t run games smoothly like AC3, but was I happy kid.
Good memories and I have you to thank for making this video on the GT210. Cheers mate
I remember this well, I used it to show H.D. vids as proof-of-life in super-cheap budget rigs of the day....I'm SO glad those days are over...lol.
Love when new videos roll in!
Just as I wrote that this card was called just "GeForce 210", not "GeForce GT 210", you said it in the video.😀 Seems like even nVidia did not dare put the "GT" moniker on it.
OTOH, I can see the original purpose of this card, and even the reasons for its success. The Core2 and early Core-i CPUs did not yet have iGPUs. Belive it or not, the majority of people aren't gamers. For cheap, it was either (similarly misearable) chipset graphics or this. Perfectly viable solution for 2D office applications and did even play video reasonably well (for the time).
I bought a BFG (remember those guys?) GTX 280 launch week in 2008. $650, which now is about $900. It was a brilliant card, but even at the time it was considered completely overkill and most didn't buy it. I kept it around a LONG time, but frankly, it's 1gb vram, performance, and DX10 limitations means it aged horribly.
So I cannot even fathom living with a GT210. I mean I have to assume even my Intel 2600K I got in 2011 would equal this thing in GPU and decoding power.
This card was the main reason why most of us completely stay away from prebuilts back in the day
7:44 I can feel the pain, I got a tecra a9 around 2012 and I remember spending my time trying to run games at insanely low settings
Oh man, this is bringing back memories of when me and my step brother tried playing games on a Geforce 9400 back when that was the best GPU I had. I'd gotten it for free, along with most of the other parts I mashed together to give him a PC in 2015 or so. But hay ... it was at least better than the 7300le he had before that, which doesn't have Windows 10 drivers.
the 9400 pounced the geforce 210 into the ground in all aspect other than direct x support.
There is another Reason why so many Geforce 210 are around. Geforce GTX 480. The first DirectX 11 Geforce Card. It was in so demand that Nvidia forced the retailers to buy 10 Mid-Tier Cards or 100 Low Tier Cards to get one GTX 480 for the first 3-4 Month. And of course the dealers bought the cheapest card which had a full 1080p set on masses, so a lot of Geforce 210 went on the Shelfes, to sell the Highend Cards. The profit on the Low-Tier cars was the same as like on a GTS 250, GTX 260, GTX 465 or GTC 4070 but the risk was far lower.
My first Nvidia was a 300 something. I loved it, it played EvE Online really well.
Added: lol, for 1080p??
I used my gf3 for 1024x768
I found a computer in a dumpster in 2010 at the apartment complex that we were living in at the time. It was a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 6GB of RAM. It was missing the graphics card so I bought the cheapest one I could find which was the Geforce 210. I had no idea that the card was good for watching movies but awful for gaming. This CPU, GPU combo was terrible to say the least. I put up with it for 10 years before getting a free upgrade to an FX8320, Radeon HD 7950 3GB Twin Frozr iii. and 16GB of DDR3 RAM. Been gaming on the FX8320 PC for 2 years now and I'm happy with it.
It reminds me of Pineapple on Pizza, something everyone hates because the Internet told you to when in real life it is not that bad and pretty good.
The GT210, 710 and 1030 are all cards like this, they are made for a reason which is NOT gaming, just a display output but because "GAMERS" said you must hate it, everyone hates it.
Not everyone wants an RTX 3090 TI in their PC just to watch some TH-cam videos, use Microsoft Word, in a school etc. These cards can do all that easily so a great, cheap and easy choice that uses nearly no power.
I remember the GT 210! It was the very first GPU I bought for the very first computer I built. I played so many Flash games with it, back when I didn't know Steam was around.
LOL, I have one in my current music studio machine with an i5 12400F.
A Zotac GT210 Synergy with 512mb of raging DDR2 to be exact.
It was in some other computer that we found in a closet when we bought the house and I was like yay spare parts well guess what, in a pinch I ended up needing it and I could not fucking BELIEVE it even worked. Even GeForce Experience was like "DEAR GOD....well....alright then" and downgraded ITSELF to its 2014 build in pity just to find the "latest drivers."
A truly sobering experience.
I'm sure the card felt like Marty McFly when I coerced it into displaying Windows 11 in modern resolutions. OMG I'm running the future!!
With two monitors it flickers like crazy and basically operates like Homer Simpson's dad falling asleep at random times, but it'll do until the i7 with integrated graphics shows up. I thought about trying Crysis for teh lulz but I don't want to blow it up before I'm done transferring all my sessions, plugins and DAW.
It is a brutal product and it was a brutal product the day it came out.
I bought one for my work PC at the time so I could watch movies/youtube and play ps1 emulators lmao. I think I paid £15 for it discounted, brand new at a PC World, I went in expecting to pay £40 for a HD5450 so when I saw the battered GT210 box for £15 offering pretty much the same thing as the other card, was a no brainer. Well worth the price for that, it was a job as a night concierge at an apartment building. Me and my colleague got tons of use out of it, it wouldn't run every PS1 game but ran a fair few of them, even MGS. Still wonder if they have the same PC and the card in there.
GT210 is a completely capable card if you choose it's tasks right. Friend of mine couple of years ago had his GPU died, and he bought a brand new GT210 instead, works fine still.
He only uses his computer for basic internet tasks and sometimes watching movies.
Your videos may not have the best hardware, but I love them good job bro 👍👍👍 I’d love to see some more full builds tho
I remember the GT210 was a very popular card back when releases. Yet I always thought the lowest entry card was always going to be terrible for gaming and only useful for a media type setup.
So this is the first i've heard about it being bad. Not that I disagree, but it's use has been specific. I actually still use the same card today.
In college I got it because I just needed a card to run dual monitors out of a slimline desktop PC and didn't do much PC gaming beyond Minecraft (it was in Alpha at the time) or AoE2/Civ4. It ran those fine, and of course played OK video.
Today it's in a sleeper "retro" pc I built in an old optiplex case with a system running XP for older games, I used a vista-era Motherboard and a Core2Quad which pushes XP pretty good. The 210 runs a lot of XP-era games pretty well, all things considered. At least, Quake 3 runs fine, and that's most of what I care for, as well as NEC PC98 emulation.
That said... anyone know a good old card I could throw in an XP machine to replace it?
Whoa I had this card some 12 years ago, hand me down from a hand-me-down Raytheon desktop PC. Many hours were spent playing Fallout 3/NV, Oblivion, Skyrim, and EVE online with this bad lad, then one day EVE updated the drivers and I couldn't log in anymore :'(
In Brazil this Gpu is still massive selling
"You might notice GTA V looks a lot like Notepad++"
That intro to the GTA V benchmarking made me crack up
I proudly own a 5450 and a 6450. They are perfect for what you said, video adapters for mobo without integrated graphics (or With poor gma 900/950) that want to decode HD x264/265 (ish)
I was distracted then I reached 5:55 and had to rewind a little just to hear the whole sentence
I wonder what does better today the GT 210 or the HD Radeon 6450. Both are extremely prolific basic display adapters. I personally used a passively cooled 6450 for about 4 years, and it actually met my needs at the time quite well, it had acceptable open drivers on GNU / Linux, was capable enough for composited desktop environments and for running two or three displays. My original intention for it was just for desktop use and basic video consumption, but I did manage to play games on it as well. 800x600 was often playable with it. I actually still keep it around just in case I need display out on something that wouldn't have it otherwise.
Oh and it actually runs Stardew Valley, so that's a point in it's favor.
The 6450 should be better. About the performance of a GT 220/340/430/530/620 and some 730 models.
I used a computer with one of these in it until a few months ago. Basically would run TF2 and some older flight sims. Nothing else. I’ve upgraded (violently) to a ryzen 9 and a 6800xt now, not sure how I lived with a gt210 for so long.
I have a challenge to sh0ot myself (not really jk) everytime someone mentions they switched from NVidia to AMD because it's so common
Well, once OCed the RAM and Shader Core, I used to play GTA IV, Battlefield 3 and many games like that, even Wolfenstein TNO, at 800×600 30 FPS always everything on low and wiping things like shadows in all the style of what Low Spec Gamer does for fun (but I was forced to do that in order to game).
I had one and was one of the 512MB DDR2 models in which the bandwidth of the DDR2 VRAM was always stagnating this poor device.
I have the exact same model, got it for free from a friend who didn't need it, I mean ut's fine for an older system that hasn't got an IGPU, it supports windows 10 and plays videos nicely, has support for multiple monitkrs and mostly a HDMI output.
Wouldn't spend more then 5$ on it tbh, glad i got kt fkr free tho, a nice piece of weird history 😀
but as a ex gt210 user myself i loved that card for lite gaming it can play at 200fps minectaft 1.8.9 and 120 on 1.12.2 .it was a amazing card at the games i played at the time
Had this from 2013 to 2014. Then I built a gaming PC with a r9 280x and a cheap FX 4300. Paired with a cheap motherboard. Big upgrade was amazed event though the only expensive part was the GPU.
I was hoping we'd get side by side with integrated graphics like old-ish Intel HD
When a card is at the bottom of the performance comparison of techpowerup, you know it's bad.
You should try Quake3 and Unreal Tournament :) I bet those would run fine.
I am using my GT210 in my Ubuntu Server and it can handle TH-cam in 720p and 1080p reasonbly well and even Dolphin in the GameCube's resolution is possible, maybe it's because of Windows or something
if you want a display adapter in a budget build, just go for iGPU (e.g. UHD 730) nowadays, if my grandparents bought me GT210 now I will feel they got "scammed"
Find this little bugger all the time in OEM PCs from this era in my recycling center. Nvidia must have sold some 100 million pieces!
Sort of reminds me of the GT 720 that I have in my desktop... Glad that I switched it out for a GTX 1650
I have 2 and my primary goal was avoiding using main dram bandwidth. It is NOT a 3d renderer.
I still have mine mount on a quad core e9400 whit 8 ram xD, and for like 10 years it was the light on the end of the tunel, Devil may cry 4 final fantasy X-X2 remaster and FF 13 eaven COD black ops 1 XD damm what fun memories it have. now is only a server cpu .
The problem is it had broken specs and didn't perform how it should have... and then they repackaged it over and over and over. They did a string of cards like this up to the GeForce GT710. Extremely power and bandwidth starved architecture to the point where ALL it could do was 2D gaming and office work. My ancient GeForce 7600GS could body the 710 and it was a lackluster card SEVEN whole generations before it.
This must have been a UK thing, cause this wasn't a common card in the US. It was more about the gt 710 over here, the card just wouldn't go away and was literally just ewaste.
I honestly wonder if embedded graphics on modern CPUs are actually more powerful? I mean, the Ryzen G models have 8 Vega cores, and the 12600K has a UHD 770 at 1.45Ghz.
Even the Intel HD3000 is more powerful usually.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial So, according to Passmark, the Intel HD 500 is actually more powerful, which means a $60 Maesto Evolve III has a more powerful GPU...
Yep that was my first graphics card, Bought it in 2010 in a complete build (Who brand new computer, keyboard, mouse, speaker, screen) for 1000€. I probably could have done better for that budget.. but i was 12 years old and didn't know anything
My first laptop had a g103m, probably about as fast as a 210, paired with a t4300 as the cpu. It ran minecraft and other similarly demanding tittles alright so it was fine for me. To be fair it only had to spit out 1366x768 so it's not like it had a massive load on it.
watching this on a 210 since my main one got fried
The gt210 is the modern day FX series.
Purpose of this card is to add a display to computer that does not have other options. And it does that job for the price.
i had the misfortune of owning a gt 210..... hey, at least it ran games from the 90s and early 2000s (Doom, Quake 1 / Quake 3 arena / unreal tournament 99 / morrowind / unreal gold / HeXeN 2 /Heretic 2 etc)
Originally it was cheap replacement for 7300Le (8400gs with 256mb dx10 vs dx9c on 7300Le) than they upgraded it few times till gt210 perfection. Reminds me on gforce2 story with gforce2 256 that reincarnated few times till MX4000
Yeah, the card is bad. But it wasn't as obsolete on release as the FX 5200! (The 5200 Ultra was fine tho) or GT 710
The thing with the GT 210 is, that they kept making the card, that people kept putting them into OEM machines. All the "HD ready" idea with it was fine. It did that just fine. It could decode video.
But interesting that you found a graphics card that won't be bottlenecked by a Pentium 4.
In terms of performance, for DX9 gaming I'll stay with my 7300 GT or with the HD 4870 I upgraded to later. Or if I want a funny low end card, the GT 420 exists.
well back in 2013 i really had no money of my own so i had to put up with the pc my uncle gifted me. the said pc was wielding a point of view g210 1gb and it was awful like a real nightmare. but still, i played saints row 3 gta 5 assassins creed up to black flag and nfs mw 2012 all in 800*600 low settings. no matter which game, it always had below 30 fps output.
When the next project comes mr Budget?
You told us something about it in the scam cex video.
Hey i have a idea! Also try the HD 6670 (preferably the 1Gb GDDR5 version) using the last non- beta drivers compare it to the Amernime drivers.Trust me, you are going to be surprised by the performance difference in some games ( at least i am considering that with the modded drivers it runs world of tanks in full 1080p Low at 80-120 fps even though it wasn't advertised as a 1080p GPU and it also runs genshin impact on 1440x900 which is also a pleasant surprise!)
Wow... you do like to torture yourself to tell a story. Bravo on a great video about a card that makes the 710 look great, makes you long for the powerhouses of 2003, makes you really reconsider modern bottom barrel Intel iGPUs.
I enjoyed this, but I felt every moment of the suffering.
The GT210 was gutless about 4 years before it even existed. An amazing feat!
Well, nope. It was usual Nvidia low(eset) segment card, and they target games released 5 years prior at low settings.
@@aleksazunjic9672 No that's the thing, the GT210 was even slower than the 9400GT which it was meant to be replacing. It's probably the worst budget segment graphics card released by nVidia or AMD/ATi. Legit would have been better to just shrink the 9400GT and add in the new video decoder.
@@TheDemocrab laughs in FX 5200, which was slower than the lowend card it was supposed to replace.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I regard the GT210 as worse simply because the FX5200 had an actual use-case - For years it and the FX5500 (Overclocked, die-shrunk version of the FX5200) were the most easily available PCI graphics cards that didn't require any external power when it was still reasonably likely to find PCs without any AGP or PCIe slots and proprietary PSU pinouts, and despite its lacklustre performance it still ran circles around any IGPs in those PCs and most of the other readily available PCI options that didn't require external power at the time.
The GT210 even came in PCI as well funnily enough, but by then it was much rarer to find a PC where PCI was the only bus option so it wasn't as useful.
@@TheDemocrab 210 was not direct replacement for 9400Gt (220 could have been) . 210 was cheapest card with hardware decoding h.264 which was huge deal back then. Overall, it was cheaper to produce gt210 in 40 nm process than to continue with 9xxx series in 80 nm process.
During the GPU shortage this was the only card consistently in stock at EVGA
Rest In Peace, EVGA GPU unit.
@@solarstrike33 RIP in peace :,(
@@dotxyn rest in peace in peace?
I had a 210 for around 5 years as my main GPU when I was 12 years old, I played CS Source, Garry's Mod, Minecraft, TF2 and GTA SA, and other very old games like the first Far Cry. I didn't knew anything about computers at that time so I thought it was amazing, I have to thank that card for making me appreciate games a lot, and since I had to be tinkering so much it eventually leaded me into programming which is now my passion and way of living.
Hey, that is quite a heartwarming story actually, 210 was useful for once!
I ran a 710 for the longest time, and I ran EVERYTHING on it. Bendy, Minecraft, editing softwares, a lot of Blender renders, etc. It was a BEAST for what I put it through. :)
@@ChloeVFX I used blender too! I remember also using Cinema4d and things like that. Hahah what a time! Now I have a much powerful GPU but I don't enjoy gaming nearly as much as I did when I had the 210. As I learned about other GPUs, I remember thinking every day how much more fun could I have with a better one, now that I do I wish I was 13 and playing with my 210 again!
@@littlewendigo5055omgg heyoo😊
I got it for free with some old pc parts. Serves as emergency/test card pretty well
For that use I have an HD4350. :D Tried once the last Carmageddon on it, ran, but was not fun. :D
thanks to my dad giving me his old gaming computer my test gpu is now a 560 ti. But primarily going to use it in his old computer as a overkill windows xp machine
I have a 1030 pulled out of a prebuilt as my backup
There is a 205. 8 Cuda cores instead of 16 so as bad as the 210 is it can get worse.
I had a 205 and 210, I think the 205 was in a Acer pc a friend gave me.
The 210 was a fanless MSI model that had ATI branded Vram.
@@thepezfeo this sounds like the card to get ty
It's pretty much geforce g100 but with different name
The actual worst of the worst is indeed an "OEM 210 PCI"
It was basically the same as the g100/205 with the added bonus of being capped at 12w TDP instead of 30w due to the PCI (not PCIE nor agp) bus.
It was about 20% slower than a 205, came with GDDR2 400 ram and was about 120mzh slower than the 205 on clock and about 300mhz in shader clock.
Whats worse is that some OEMs were display locked, so they did work for video decode/encode but nothing else, you couldn't connect any monitor to the vga or dvi despite having them.
205 sounds like something you would buy your friend for april fools lol
The GT210 had the perfomance of a card that was released 4 years before it's release
I honestly wonder if even the 6800 Ultra has better performance, honestly.
And that's a flagship from *_2004._*
It did target games released roughly 5 years earlier, as lowest tier Nvidia cards do. Video decoding was its main forte, and it made it sell so well.
Yeah, fits about with the 7900 cards, so 5 years old high end is about it.
Which is also why the GT 710 is much worse in comparison. 5 Years before that was, oh not 5 year old highend, but 5 year old midrange with the 9600.
@@solarstrike33 it did LFMAO
And that was essentially what they were aiming for. A CHEAP card for basic use, that could also play video with hardware acceleration. Offices, schools, people who just wanted to browse the web etc don't need gaming performance. If you wanted a card primarily to play games, they made plenty of those too. It's no different today. A lot of computers have a basic iGPU or low end card for the same reasons.
A few years ago a friend of mine asked for a new graphics card for his birthday (he was playing with integrated graphics on whatever cheep second hand CPU he was using). Long story short his parents bought him a brand new 210 from amazon. When installed in his PC it ran at about half the proformace of his integrated graphics and for fear of his parents being upset we spent about 20 minutes in the bios/random windows settings to disable the card so he didn't have to remove it. The card may be designed to be a display adapter but it is not marketed as such misleading non tech-savy people (such as my friends parents).
Man... The GT 210. I remember in 2009 or something the netcafe near my home received a full upgrade and every PC over there had a GT 210, I remember emulating Megaman X Command Mission on one of the machine using Dolphin and it was soo slow. But people didn't really care about it being powerful or not , the popular games at that time was a counter-strike clone made in Lithtech Jupiter, called Crossfire, the game tend to defaults to low settings and 800x600 resolution out of the box, the attitude was as long as it plays fine it doesn't matter, most people didn't even know what resolution settings were.
crossfire was the shit
In my high school there was a teacher whose office was next to a computer lab and they'd let a bunch of us LAN unreal tournament during lunchtime especially on wet days, I was the only kid who knew you could change the resolution from the default 640x480.
Computer lab had 9600Pros in it as it was also used for CAD classes, I cranked those graphics settings :D
Crossfire. Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
I have this card wayback 2010, until my brother swapped it for gt220.. he installed this gt210 on the pc vendo machine he assembled for his customer, i also remember him testing this card playing crysis 1 on the lowest resolution on the lowest possible setting at 8 fps 🤣.. the GT220 he gave to me gives my installed games a little breathing room, i also obtained a copy of crysis 1 and game on 800x600 on low-medium settings at 25-30 fps..
It's amazing that they still make these. They're old enough that I've found three of them at an electronics recycler, but still in production.
Before even watching the video, let me just type I do appreciate your in-depth insights on tech stuff. It's a nice little history lesson few channels dive into, especially the parts showing contemporary (at the time) reactions to them. That research takes some time both to find and analyze!
There are so many versions of the GeForce 210 I have to wonder how awful the best version is. I have one that supposedly has 24 shading units according to GPU-Z which probably isn't right but let me tell ya, even with the extra shaders, GDDR3, and decent clocks... it's still pretty bad in games. As a display adapter... well it works. BUT considering they were still sold new as recent as 2021... terrible. There were and still are far cheaper and better options especially if looking used. I remember wanting one, before I knew what GPU really were for my old Pentium 4 system back in the day.. then I found out the motherboard can't support the GeForce 210s that were available. That's when I knew it was time to upgrade everything!
This card did have a little plus, it did provide a cheap way for home servers to output to a display
that is what that card is really meant for
Honestly, I've bought these as well - these are excellent framebuffers for machines that have CPUs without iGPUs (eg when I do a Ghetto Xeon build with one of those chinesium 'X79' or 'X99' boards). They've got excellent driver support as well, and if it's just to operate an ESXi/Linux/WinServer console this is more than good enough. I know that there are other framebuffers you can abuse for this purpose, but since this card has been around for so long, it's got decent drivers for just about any OS you want to use with it - you can even get it to work in high res/256 colour mode on Win3.11 or NT 3.5
With the resources wasted by this card, we probably could have achieved world peace instead.
Think of the GT210 as good for 640*480 games up till 2006. This GPU also was in the Nvidia ION and ION2. Basically, this beats a Wii. No, not a Wii U, a Wii.
Damn, not even 6800 Ultra-level performance?
The games do kind of look like someone attempted to port them to the original Xbox/Wii/GC/PS2.
Great vid. I love watching your cheap old laptop benchmarks and reviews. I hope you get to 500k soon. Cheers
Around 2010 I ended up with an old first gen Athlon64 X2, since I didn't have any PCIe video cards I ran out and picked up the cheapest one I could find. I was quite horrified to find the 210 was about half the speed of my AGP GeForce 6600 GT, a mid range card from 2004.
Holy crap these are still selling! This is pure madness, although I can see why after that period of stupid prices due to Covid and now inflation hitting. Like you said much more affordable cards out there that are much more powerful, I think I saw a GTX980 in CEX the other day for £125.00.
This card was great when you just needed a display on a system and the mobo didn’t have an output. Of course the pci tridents were always much more preferable.
My first GPU when I bought my first "gaming" PC was the GT510
my first was the gts250
I thought I upgraded once from a 9400 GT to a GT 210. how little did I know back than. Although the water in diablo 2 seemed to look better with it.
Newer equals better!!
This is bc gt 210 has dx 10.1 which diablo 2 uses it for while 9400gt uses dx10.0 in diablo 2
12:19 I got a rebrand of a HD 6450 (R5 230 which unfunnily works with HD 6450 drivers) which I gave to my friend once I bought myself a decent machine that did not have a Pentium 4 531 with 1GB RAM
11:01 Minecraft is actually a really good and fun game to tweak. I got 1.19 running at 100fps semi-stable on a mobile Core 2 Duo and Intel GMA X3100 graphics, be it on Linux with some shader hacks and low resolution, but it is actually working! The GT 210 should be 65% faster than that (according to UserBenchmark), so it would be really nice to see how well it would perform with those settings :D
In my opinion, he should use Garry’s Mod more as a benchmark.
Also, MCPE corrupts if you have more than 10MB of mods.
That is really good performance. In fact, that is much better than my tests on a Pentium 4/GTX 660 Ti setup.
Oh, and userbenchmark is really only good to compare the hardware with itself.
I purchased one of these a few years ago, no not as any kind of gaming card but for a 1080p picture? A lot of cpu's have no inbuilt graphics, you get a problem with your GPU you are fried. I seriously cannot imagine buying this for gaming, but it is excellent for getting a picture output. I love mine as a trusted backup.
I'd like to share a budget build of mine that I'm absolutely giddy over. I got a Dell optiplex 990, old office station. With Intel graphics and 4 GB of slow ram, it got 20 fps in GTA V with below lowest settings. But I added 16 GB of ram, and threw an RX 550 in it, and now I have 60 fps on GTA V, Fallout 4, and CSGO with Medium and High settings at 768p. This is so awesome for me because I've only ever had potatoes before, nothing capable of running these games like this. It was only 150 American Dollars, and with only 8 GB and a more competitively priced Optiplex, one could probably build it for 100.
I respect your willingness to put any GPU you buy in your PC, I would be very worried to do that
I would have a specific test PC for that stuff. Just so that my main will not in any way be affected.
To be honest, I used to have a PC with no iGPU that I transformed in a NAS/server and I needed some kind of "graphics adapter" because I kept the RTX I had for my newer beast gaming PC. One friend gave me this for the price of a vodka and I'm more than happy with that low end very low power card for what I do with it. Ofc, I tried to "game" on it just for the laughs, and damn, I would never think of this for a gaming PC lol.
Meanwhile, it can be a fun thingy for a retro gaming PC...
Oh, and BTW, those cards are often raped asf in MSi Afterburner 😂
Video Adaptor? More like Video Incinerator.
This alongside the GT430 and GT610 were a must have if you build Hacintosh. Mac OSX just works with them and getting Intel HD to work was a nightmare
Using GT210 with Pentium 4 or Core 2 Duo gives way better performance than a modern CPU. You should test with old CPUs, the GPU was made for.
Honestly i feel like it should be illegal to sell anything with a GPU lower than a 1050 as a "Gaming PC", its literally just misleading marketing to trick someones mom.
Alright chaps press that like.
If it was DX 11 compliant it would be still selling today. Well, you can have a 610.
the fact that this GPU handles Mount&Blade Warband worse than my Intel integrated GPU from 2013, + the 240p CS:GO made me laugh for quite a while, ngl, it's almost unbelievable that there's a card this worse than an INTEL INTEGRATED GRAPHICS THING, on a LAPTOP, that's only 4 years younger
(it's the i3 4005U with it's Intel HD 4400 and now 8GB of RAM btw)
The best case for this card is steamlink. Because it can accelerate h264 I've been able to use an old one for remote play. That also means it can basically be used as terminal for your more powerful PC once you quit big screen
@@09f9 Right, any i3-2120 can do that job, and perform about as well as the 210
The best use, but not the best solution of course.
@@09f9 agreed that it's not the best solution, but it's the best outcome for the card itself
I watched this video at 1080p via a... GT210! 🤣
Needed a new G card, didn't want to spend much, bought this one on eBay for £7 posted and it's done fine. This isn't a gaming PC though, just an old box to watch YT, Netflix, Facebook etc
I remember they were selling "HD gaming" PC's with this POS GPU in them.
It's more fun to kill it overclocking it rather than using it for anything.
Yes it's harsh, but the truth often is.
A dude build his PC at 2019. His RTX 2060 Super was delayed by Amazon for some issues so, for two weeks he had to use his new Ryzen 5 3600 with a GT 210 for working lmao.