Nvidia's GT210 Story...The Card That Everyone Hates!

Hello everyone and welcome to another Budget Builds Episode where today I am finally going to take a look at the frankly awful GT210, but that wasnt always the case originally released as a display adapter just for media acceleration and basic gaming...So what happened, join me for benchmarks and more in the GT210 Story.

Intro - 0:00
So what is the GT210 - 0:21
History of the GT210 Continued- 1:40
The Specs - 3:57
Benchmark Start - 5:40
CSGO (240p - Lowest) - 5:41
Skyrim (480p-ish - Lowest) - 6:32
GMod (1024x768 - Low, No Shadows, No Details) - 7:29
Fable:TLC (720p Low) - 8:25
GTA V (480p Low, No Shadows, No Reflections) - 9:04
M&B Warband (720p Low, DirectX7 Mode) - 9:55
Stardew Crashey (Windows Desktop Momentl) - 10:32
Minecraft (720p - Fast with Optifine) - 11:00
Emulation, Video Testing, and Just General Misery - 11:46
Conclusion - 13:26

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Specs:
CPU: Ryzen R7 3700X
GPU: Nvidia Geforce GT210 (3 of them, one was a GT310...How fancy)
RAM: 32GB DDR4 RAM
OS: Windows 10

#gt210 #nvidia

[BudgetBuildsOfficial]

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. 😎

[Caarajack]

210 as a gaming card is as good as those tiny USB fans as air conditioner.

[JeffWaynee]

The GT210 was gutless about 4 years before it even existed. An amazing feat!

[Polygraph]

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.

[dotxyn]

During the GPU shortage this was the only card consistently in stock at EVGA

[nuglord]

I loathe this card. Every single business PC I’ve seen with a GT210 or GT710 already had a superior iGPU.

[aleksazunjic]

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.

[razcodes]

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.

[TheChilledThunder]

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).

[nrsca]

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.

[averageuser]

The GT210 had the perfomance of a card that was released 4 years before it's release

[tyttuut]

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.

[wallachia]

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

[whattodo]

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.

[elecktr]

I got it for free with some old pc parts. Serves as emergency/test card pretty well

[somehow_not_helpfulATcrap]

There is a 205. 8 Cuda cores instead of 16 so as bad as the 210 is it can get worse.

[zesped]

Great vid. I love watching your cheap old laptop benchmarks and reviews. I hope you get to 500k soon. Cheers

[YvanJanssens]

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

[memesthatmakemelaughforhou]

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.

[Sheovion]

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