Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The GeForce GT 220 video card's 48 processing cores do not really provide enough horse power to play today's popular game titles with some of the eye candy turned on. With twice as many stream processors the GeForce GT 240 is able to better play games and our testing showed that in certain scenarios this video card can nearly double the performance of the GeForce GT 220. If you don't use anti-aliasing and use resolutions of 1280x1024 or 1440x900 for gaming then this card is a very good choice.
For those looking for a budget graphics card that is overclocking friendly, we found this retail boxed card to overclock very well. Overclocking core from 550MHz to 665MHz and the stream processors from 1340MHz to 1810MHz was a much higher overclock than what we expected, but we'll take it and run. For a single slot graphics card these are very impressive numbers and the 400+ MHz increase we got on the stream processors is what really made a noticeable difference in games and applications. If you happen to be running applications like F@H you know how big of a performance difference this overclock will make!
When we reviewed the EVGA GeForce GT 220 SSC a few weeks ago we had complaints about the noisy fan used on the cooling solution. We must say that the EVGA GeForce GT 240 SuperClocked video card has a much quieter cooling fan on it and while you can hear the card running it doesn't stand out from any other fans in our test system. The video card's ability to use a single HDMI 1.3a cable to connect to an HDTV is a nice touch and adds flexibility to it, if one should ever want to use it for a HTPC system or a media player down the road.
When it comes to pricing the $119 price tag on this graphics card is a little hard to swallow from a gaming perspective. You can run out and purchase a PNY GeForce 9800 GT 1GB for $79.99 shipped after rebate this very second, which is a faster graphics card for less money. It won't be built on the 40nm process, have the ability to do HDMI 1.3a or be as energy efficient, but it costs $40 less and has 16 more shader cores. Both are single slot cards and don't require an additional power header from the power supply, so it is a tough choice. The GT 240 supports new technologies like DirectX 10.1 and DirectCompute though, so you really need to figure out what is more important to you. Would you rather own a card that costs less and is faster in games and applications like F@H or would you rather have a card that can run DirectX 10.1, DirectCompute and is HDMI ready? For $25 more you can purchase the ATI Radeon HD 5750, which is a DirectX 11 graphics card that had a much higher performance level in the DirectX 9 and 10 titles that we benchmarked here today. The GeForce GT 240 is in a very competitive price category as you can see!
Legit Bottom Line: The GeForce GT 240 is nearly twice as fast as the GeForce GT 220, but faces tough competition with its older sibling, the GeForce 9800GT.
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