Galaxy Geforce GT240 512MB GDDR5 Graphic Card Review

The Geforce GT240 – supposedly the 9600GT / 9600GSO replacement. Is it a worthy successor to those awesome 9 series cards?

The Appearance

Unlike the Galaxy Geforce GT220, the Galaxy Geforce GT240 looks more like a shrunken version of the Galaxy Geforce GTX260+ Razor Edition. Note the shiny grey / silver heatsink enclosure.

As you can see from the photo below, it’s looks like the commonly seen heatsink on nVidia cards. It’s just that this card has it covered, making it look attractive (subjective matter, yes?).

The card also comes with HDMI, DVI and VGA output.

The Bundle

– The card
– Installation CD and guide

Card Details

Here’s a summarized detail of the card.

Not helpful, isn’t it? Basically, it’s a 128bit card running 512MB GDDR5 (as per title). The memory bandwidth comes to about 57.6GB/sec.

Test Setup

The computer setup used for this review.

The Performance

I’m comparing this card to the Galaxy GeForce 9600GT Low Power Low Profile and also the GT220 and even the Sapphire HD4670. It should give a good idea on how this card performs. 🙂

Basically these 2 are in between the actual GT220 and 9600GT. As seen in the details given earlier, this GT220 is the overclocked version while the 9600GT LP LP is the downclocked version.

World In Conflict

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Interestingly the card performs just as good as the 9600GT LP LP and the GT220 with lowered details.

Company Of Heroes : Opposing Fronts

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

In CoH, the GT240 levels the competition by huge margin.

Lost Planet : Extreme Condition

Graphic Detail : Maximum at 1680 x 946

Looks good, the GT240 does trails pretty closely to the 9600GT LP LP.

Crysis

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

🙂 The GT240 performs just as bad as the GT220 with the max setting (which obviously isn’t a helpful resolution to begin with), but with the lowering of settings the tables change and the GT240 on HIGH setting performs just as well as the GT220 on MEDIUM. And the GT240 on MEDIUM setting gives almost 50% boost from what the GT220 could provide on MEDIUM.

H.A.W.X.

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

The GT240 again comes very close to the slightly down-clocked 9600GT.

Furmark

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Operating Temperature

Furmark was used for graphic card stressing.

Readings were taken when ambient temperature was around 23°C.

– Load, Furmark was run for 1 minute at 1680×1050 with 4xAA.
– Stress, Furmark was run under the Stress Test mode for 5 minutes.

Power Consumption

A little more details on the maximum power consumption of the GT240 based card.

Reference

Conclusion

Unlike the GT220, I think the GT240 is a nice card that – supposedly a 9600GT / 9600GSO replacement. I feel like the card is the 9600GSO incarnate. The card comes with 96 stream processors just like the early generation 9600GSO (8800GS) but build on a 40nm processor, thus reducing power consumption – lower power consumption compared to the 9600GT (96w) and 9600GSO (90w).

Compared to the 9600GT LP, it looks like the GT240 loses out on core clock and shader clock. From what I see, priced the GT240 cards correctly and it’ll be the GT220 and HD4670 killer. 🙂

As for this copy from Galaxy, it’s all good and I think it looks great as well. The card is expected to retail at around RM 330 (similar priced as the 9600GT cards) and for those who do folding@home – the 96 CUDA cores is a plus! Pretty much the 9600SGO performance for folding, at lesser wattage. 🙂

If I could summarize this card in a few words, I’ll just say “It is a 9600GSO that consumes lesser power”. (I only wish I have a 9600GSO now to compare it with, anyone wants to send me one?)