November 17th, 2009
GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's sub-$100 DirectX 10.1 graphics card
You can get a lot of power for under $100 when it comes to GPUs nowadays, but NVIDIA have just launched the GeForce GT 240 - decent performance, low power consumption and a decent price.
OK, so what’s special about the GeForce GT 240? Well, to begin with, it fully supports DirectX 10.1, something which other high-end NVIDIA cards don’t do. Might seem a trivial point when you consider that ATI already have DirectX 11 parts out been delayed until (NVIDIA’s Fermi has been delayed until 2010), but it’s darn hard to get hold of any Radeon HD 5870 or 5850 cards. Also, it’s early days for DirectX 11 anyway in terms of games.
OK, so it supports DirectX 10.1, what else is special about the GeForce GT 240? Well, it’s NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card that doesn’t require an auxiliary PCIe power connector. This means no need to mess about with powering the card which can sometimes be a pain (both from a PSU standpoint, and physically getting the card plus cabling to fit).
It’s also a very good spec - 40nm fab process, 550MHz core, with 1360MHz shaders, and 512MB of 2000MHz GDDR5 memory, 96 CUDA cores. All this for a maximum power draw of 70W. Pretty impressive stuff.
Then there’s price - sub-$100, which is a sweet spot.
Early reviews are quite positive:
All in all, a good card. But NVIDIA can’t afford to sit still because ATI will have competition for this card out probably by the end of the year. But for now, the GeForce GT 240 is a very good buy.
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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