In theory this is a great position for the card, but reality bites, hard. Officially, NVIDIA says the following about the GT 240: “The GeForce GT 240 sits between the GeForce GT 220 and GeForce 9800 GT in price and performance.” In essence this is intended to be a significantly faster GT 220, a solid card whose only crime was price. This results in 3 cards: An $89 GT 240 with 512MB of DDR3, a $99 GT 240 with 1GB of DDR3, and a $99 GT 240 with 512MB of GDDR5. The former has 25.44GB/sec of memory bandwidth, while the latter has 54.4GB/sec. There is a DDR3 based GT 240, and a GDDR5 based GT 240.
For the sake of comparison this is also half as many ROPs as on the 9600GT and 9800GT, both of which are also clocked higher.Īs is often the case with lower-end products, the GT 240 is actually composed of two specifications. So not only did the GT 240 not get more rasterizing power to go with its other enhanced abilities, but in fact it’s ever-so-slightly slower than the GT 220 when it comes to rasterizing. Specifically the number of ROPs remains the same at 8, and worse yet the core clock speed is only 550MHz on the GT 240, versus 625MHz (or more) on the GT 220. Unfortunately, not everything got the same boost as compared to the GT 220.
The transistor cost of these extra functional units means that the GT 240 comes in at an estimated 727M transistors, occupying a die area we measure at 144mm2. NVIDIA’s latest efforts at lowering idle power usage can be seen here, with a 9W idle power usage (only 2W more than the GT 220) while load power is specified as 70W – 70W likely being chosen to avoid the need for a PCIe power connector.
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