Axle GeForce G210 512MB
Mar 11th, 2010 | By NivedhIn terms of overclocking, I wasn’t able to push the Axle G210 very much but this is a budget card and not one meant to be pushed very hard. Still, I was able to overclock the core to 640 MHz (stock 590), memory to 835 MHz (stock 790) and shader to 1445 MHz (stock 1400). Due to the very minor overclocking, I did not bother to test the effects of overclocking on performance.
The card ran at relatively low operating temperatures during all tests. The highest temperature I noticed was about 52C which is not bad at all – a testament to the Arctic Cooling Accelero L4 cooler. Also, the cooler is extremely quiet and is easily masked by the case fans.
Here is the test setup:
Control:
CPU: AMD Phenom 9950 X4 Black Edition 2.6 GHz
Motherboard: Asus M3A78 Pro
PSU: FSP Power Mod 700W
Memory: OCZ Vista Upgrade Edition DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) 4GB (2×2GB)
Hard Drive: Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160GB SATA II 8MB cache
Optical: Samsung DVD±RW
Case: Antec P182
Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Video Card: Axle GeForce G210 512MB, PNY GeForce 8600GTS 512MB
Drivers: NVIDIA 196.21 WHQL
I will be putting the cards through a benchmarking regiment involving both synthetic and gaming benchmarks. Since the 8600GTS was a midrange card of the previous generation, it will be interesting to compare the entry-level but newer G210 with it for illustrative purposes.
The synthetic benchmarks will consist of Futuremark 3DMark05 and 3DMark06, Maxon CineBench 10 and Lightsmark. Although 3DMark06 is based on DirectX 9, it will give a good indication of what the cards are capable of.
The gaming benchmarks will consist of BioShock, Call of Duty 4, and Crysis at different resolutions and anisotropic filtering (AF) and antialiasing (AA) settings. Since the Axle G210 is not exactly a gaming card, we won’t focus too much on these.
Each benchmark result is the average of three runs.
Note that the benchmarks are meant to be indicative as to the relative performance of the video cards and are by no means absolute scores to be used for comparison with your system as performance depends on several factors.