The EVGA GeForce GT 240

Two weeks ago NVIDIA released the GeForce GT 240 graphics card to help fill in the gap in pricing and performance between the GeForce GT 220 and GeForce GT 250 graphics cards. The GeForce GT 240 is nothing new in terms of features and performance, but the chip that powers it is made using the latest 40nm manufacturing process at TSMC. The GeForce GT 240 is aimed at the entry level discrete graphics card market at the fiercely competitive $99 price point. Video cards below the $100 price point are usually aimed at desktop users that have integrated graphics and are looking for a simple and inexpensive add-in graphics card that will help boost system performance. The GeForce GT 240 looks like a cutting edge graphics card on paper with 96 stream processors, 512MB GDDR5 memory, Dual-link DVI & HDMI 1.3a HDCP compliant output connections for HDTV's, and they have been built using the latest 40nm manufacturing process. On top of that the GT 240 also supports NVIDIA PhysX, OpenCL and CUDA technologies, not to mention Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and DirectCompute (a feature found in Windows 7).

	GeForce 9500 GT	GeForce GT 220	GeForce GT 240	EVGA GT 240 SuperClocked	GeForce 9600 GT	GeForce 9800 GT
Shader units	32	48	96	96	64	112
ROPs	8	8	8	8	16	16
GPU	G96	GT216	GT215	GT215	G94	G92
Transistors	314M	486M	727M	727M	505M	754M
Mem Size	256 MB / 512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB	512 MB / 1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Bandwidth	25.6 GB/s	25.3 GB/s	54.4 GB/s	57.4 GB/s	57.6 GB/s	57.6GB/s
Core Clock	550 MHz	625 MHz	550 MHz	550 MHz	650 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	800 MHz	790 MHz	1700MHz	1800 MHz	900 MHz	900 MHz
Shader Clock	1400MHz	1360MHz	1340MHz	1340 MHz	1625MHz	1500MHz
Price	$52.99	$69.99	$99.99	$109.99	$67.83	$134.99

Taking a look at some of the key specifications over the past few generations of NVIDIA graphics cards you can see that the EVGA GeForce GT 240 SuperClocked should be slightly faster than the GeForce 9600 GT since it has more shader units (stream processors), but slightly slower than the GeForce 9800 GT as it has fewer shader units. When it comes to memory bandwidth the GT 240 has just a 128-bit bus, but as you can see the faster GDDR5 memory ICs make up for the narrow bus and the memory bandwidth is nearly identical to the GeForce 9600 GT and 9800 GT video cards. The GeForce GT 240 has twice the number of shader units and uses much faster memory than the GeForce GT 220, so we can assume that it will perform nearly twice as fast in some benchmarks and games. The kicker here is that all sorts of GeForce 9800 GT video cards can be found for $79-89 after rebate on Newegg.com currently, so the GeForce GT 240 has its work cut out for itself.

A quick look at the EVGA website under Graphics Cards will show that they have not one, but three GeForce GT 240 graphics cards on the market today. 

EVGA Model Name	Part Number	GPU Clock	Shader Clock	Mem Clock	Price
GT 240 SuperClocked	512-P3-1242-LR	550MHz	1340MHz	1800MHz	$119.99
GeForce GT 240	512-P3-1241-LR	550MHz	1340MHz	1701MHz	$99.99
GeForce GT 240	512-P3-1240-LR	550MHz	1340MHz	1700MHz	$99.99

The only real difference between the three models are slight differences in the memory clock, as both the core clock and shader clock frequencies are identical on all three video cards. Today, we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce GT 240 SuperClocked edition graphics card. This card has a factory overclock as the name implies, but only the memory is bumped up. The core and shader clock speeds, which should help boost performance, mostly remain at stock reference designed speeds. This is a bit strange for a card that carries a $20 price premium if you ask us. At first we thought the SuperClocked edition would be the only one that came with a sexy black PCB rather than the normal yucky green PCB, but you can also get a black PCB on the $99 cards.