so today I'm going to be having a quick look at a Gigabyte GeForce 210 512 Meg
video card there's uh one thing that Gigabyte really wants you to know about
this particular card and it is that it supports HDMI they have a goldplated
HDMI connector on this particular card you can see that the whole back is
pretty much about how it has a golden plated HDMI connector so there's your
little connector it says golden plated then there's your supports full HD
resolution this is a whole bun all of this stuff is all about h HDMI and how
this is goldplated then you've got main features down here in little tiny text
something about GeForce 210 supports PC Express 2.0 Shader Model 4.1 etc etc
this is a direct X10 card so why don't we go ahead and get this open the direct
X10 functionality is not particularly important for a card like this this is
not really a gaming card it is far more valid or excuse me valid it's far more
relevant as a uh more like a media card so if you were building a media center
and you wanted some kind of dedicated GPU if you want to offload some of the
processing for HD video off to the GPU this would be a perfect fit so you can
see it comes with a low profile bracket which is labeled DVI and
HDMI there it is comes with a driver disc so don't use that download the
latest off NVIDIA.com then it comes with a user's manual okay so the user's
manual shows you the board layout it shows you um oh okay so we'll we'll see
this in a minute but it looks like it has a VGA connector as well which you
can actually remove if you're using it in a low profile case shows you how to
connect HDMI how to install the software a bunch of different languages thank you
so much and then in here on a little piece of foam in an antistatic bag you
have the GeForce 210 512 Mag video card
so if I could just get that wow look how long this piece of tape is there we go
it came off excellent so the layout of
the card is fairly straightforward you've got your standard heat sink which
is actually pretty nice this is an aluminum heat sink you can tell from how
light the card is overall has a little tiny fan this I'm not too happy to see
but my suspicion is that with a low power draw low heat output GPU like this
even if the Fan's not spinning very fast you're going to get enough Cooling in
order for it to function properly so I suspect this doesn't need to spin very
fast because when these little fans ramp up man are they annoying so it connects
via normal three pin header to the uh to the video card itself there's not a
whole lot in terms of components on this card so you can see it does use a
standard PCI Express 16x connection at the back you do not find any additional
power needed for this particular video card on the back of the card you can see
we've got a couple RAM chips and then a couple of Clips right here for how the
front cooler fastens okay then on the
back we will find all of the connectivity from the VGA connection to
the DVI connection to the much touted goldplated HDMI connection so you
can see that while the other two are actually nickel plated okay so you can
see this is nickel plated the HDMI connector is goldplated now they'll tell
you a whole bunch of marketing spiel about how this means uh better support
for HD resolutions or or whatever else but the reality of it is that goldplated
doesn't actually mean that you have particularly better signal transmission
but what it does mean is that the connector is far more durable so if you
were to unplug or plug back in or if the cable gets wiggled gold is a soft and
malleable metal and so even though it's not the best conductor out there it Con
enough and because it's so soft it ensures that you always have a good
connection so you're not going to actually lose contact between your cable
and your connector if they're both goldplated it's very unlikely so that is
why a goldplated connector is actually important