Both the Inno3D GT210 and the Gainward GT220 products support Nvidia's CUDA technology, which can accelerate various tasks as soon as you use a software that supports CUDA.

A common scenario would be the video playback as well as video/audio encoding. CUDA would be very useful for a product such as the "weak" GT210 series, since it could give an extra performance boost when the card is powering an HTPC.

For our tests we used CyberLink's PowerDVD 9 with the latest updates installed. Our tests showed that enabling the hardware acceleration significantly drops the utilization of the CPU.

The results are impressive. With the hardware acceleration enabled, the CPU Usage dropped down to 1%, meaning that all the rendering load had passed to the GPU leaving our CPU available for other tasks.

The benefit of hardware acceleration could not be very obvious in powerful systems, but users of low powered systems (like Atom systems) would highly appreciate it. CUDA could also help a lot in applications like Photoshop, TMPGEnc etc.

- Overclocking

The overclocking margins of any graphics card highly depend on their factory clockings (core/memory) as well as on the efficiency of their cooling system. We were curious to see which would be the limits of the Inno3D GT210 and Gainward GT220 cards due to their 40nm design.

Since the Rivatuner utility didn't support the GT220/GT210 cards out-of-the-box, we used Nvidia's own OC tuner.

The best score for stable operation we got with the Gainward GT220 was 699MHz/1578MHz/900MHz for core/shaders/memory. The results are very good and have in mind that a more efficient cooler could allow you to obtained even higher overclocking:

Passing to the more underpowered Inno3D GT210 and by following the same method, we managed to get even much higher overclocking margins. The card gave a stable operation at 753MHz/1655MHz/639MHz for the core, shaders and memory, respectively. We should note here that although a good overclocking could benefit such underpowered graphics card, don't expect any serious improvements with demanding games like Crysis.