GeForce GT 240 Specifications

Like GeForce 210 and GT 220, the GeForce GT 240 is built on TSMC’s 40-nm manufacturing process and supports DirectX 10.1.

Up to this point, the chip has been offered as an OEM-only product, limiting sales to system vendors who may want to use the card in specific PCs (HTPCs for instance). Now that TSMC’s 40-nm process is more mature though, supply has increased to the point where NVIDIA’s opening sales to the retail level.

Officially NVIDIA’s slating the GT 240 between the GT 220 and 9800 GT on their food chain of products. This slot was previously held by the 9600 GT.

On paper, the GT 240 has a couple of advantages over the 9600 GT. While NVIDIA still doesn’t tout DirectX 10.1 as a compelling addition over DX10, the newer shader model support should give GT 240 an edge in titles that can take advantage of it. Thanks to its 40-nm manufacturing process, the GT 240 also boasts lower power consumption than the 9600 GT and doesn’t need an external power connector.

The following spec chart summarizes the rest of the differences between the GeForce GT 240 and the 9600 GT:

GeForce 9600 GT vs GT 240 Comparison
	GeForce 9600 GT 96W	GeForce 9600 GT 59W	GeForce GT 240
# of Stream Processors	64	64	96
Graphics Core Clock	650MHz	600MHz	550MHz
Stream Processor Clock	1625MHz	1500MHz	1340MHz
ROPs	16	16	8
Pixel Fillrate	10.4 GPixels/sec	9.6 GPixels/sec	4.4 GPixels/sec
Texture Units	32	32	32
Texture Fillrate	20.8 GTexels/sec	19.2 GTexels/sec	17.6 GTexels/sec
Memory Clock	900MHz	900MHz	1700 MHz GDDR5, 1000MHz GDDR3, 900MHz DDR3
Memory Size	512 MB or 1 GB	512 MB or 1 GB	512 MB or 1 GB
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth	57.6 GB/sec	57.6 GB/sec	32.0 GB/s (GDDR3) 54.4 GB/s (GDDR5)
DirectX Support	10.0	10.0	10.1
SLI Support	Yes	Yes	No
GeForce 3D Vision Ready	Yes	Yes	Yes
NVIDIA PhysX Ready	Yes	Yes	Yes
NVIDIA CUDA Ready	Yes	Yes	Yes
OpenGL Support	2.1	2.1	3.2
Standard Display Support	Two Dual Link DVI HDTV	Two Dual Link DVI HDTV	Dual Link DVI, VGA HDMI
HDCP	Yes	Yes	Yes
Max Digital Resolution	2560x1600	2560x1600	2560x1600
Max VGA Resolution	2048x1536	2048x1536	2048x1536
Audio Input for HDMI	SPDIF	SPDIF	Internal
Reference board height	4.376 inches	4.376 inches	4.376 inches
Reference board length	9 inches	7 inches	6.6 inches
Max Board Power	96W	59W	69W
Supplementary Power Connectors	6-Pin PCIe	No	No
Minimum Power Supply Required	400W	300W	300W

Notes

As you can see, the GeForce GT 240 features more shaders than the 9600 GT – 96 vs 64 – but is armed with slower clocks. This negates the advantage of the extra shaders somewhat. You’ll also see that the GT 240 features fewer ROP units. With fewer ROPs and slower speeds, peak pixel rate is down to just 4.4Gpixels/sec, less than half that of the 9600 GT. Texture fill rate is also down thanks to the slower clock speeds.

Finally, thanks to the narrower 128-bit memory interface, memory bandwidth is also lower than that of the 9600 GT.

Based on all this, the GeForce GT 240 is going to have its work cut out for it if it intends to keep up with the 9600 GT.

Fortunately DirectX 10.1 can be used by the GT 240 to enhance performance in games that take advantage of it. One effect that’s being used by increasingly more games is high definition ambient occlusion (HDAO). In games that use HDAO like STALKER Clear Sky/Call of Pripyat, and HAWX, the GT 240 could potentially use DX10.1 to gain an advantage over the 9600 GT. We’ll see how this pans out in the benchmarks.

One important figure that’s not mentioned in the table above is price. Street prices for the GeForce GT 240 start at $90 for the slower DDR3 model, and hit $100 and up for cards equipped with 512MB of GDDR5. This is quite a bit more than the 9600 GT, which starts at $80 before mail-in rebate. So the 9600 GT costs less and features better performance specs than the GT 240. The GeForce GT 240 also lacks SLI support.

This is a feature NVIDIA typically omits on their entry-level VGA offerings like the GeForce 8400 GS and 9400 series. Previous mainstream offerings like the 8600 GT, 9500 GT, and of course the GeForce 9600 series have all had SLI support, so this is a bit of a departure for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA says that the typical GeForce GT 240 user doesn’t plan to use SLI, and while that’s certainly true, we still think it’s a glaring oversight considering the card it replaces has always supported the feature.