So today we'll be looking at the GeForce GT 240. It's an entry level sub-100 USD product which brings some 'okay' game performance to the table, but it could easily function as a dedicated PhysX card or generic accelerator as well. Thinking here in terminology like Photoshop CS4 acceleration, transcoding videos, accelerating and post processing video's and really new is actually Flash 10.1 acceleration, which is rather handy in big high-resolution environments.
The card we received comes from MSI and is in fact their OC model. It's their own design with nice black PCB, custom performance cooler and really nice connectivity in the likings of DVI, SUB-D and even HDMI. Embedded is of course the 'new' 40nm based G215 GPU core which houses 96 shader/stream processors tied down to eight ROP units. Though the DirectX 11 era has started, NVIDA has not been able to put out any DX11 class products. The GeForce GT 240 however does get a minor improvement as there has been a shift from DX 10 towards DirectX 10.1 for this GPU.
Here are some generic specs for the GeForce GT 240 (reference)
Fabrication Process 40 nm
Graphics Clock (texture and ROP units) 550 MHz
Processor Clock (Shader units) 1360 MHz
Memory Clock (Clock rate / Data rate)
1700 MHz / 3400 MHz (GDDR5)
1000 MHz / 2000 MHz (DDR3)
Total Video Memory 512MB or 1GB
Memory Interface 128-bit
Total Memory Bandwidth
32.0 GB/s (DDR3)
54.4 GB/s (GDDR5)
Shader Cores 96
ROP Units 8
Texture Filtering Units 32
Texture Filtering Rate (billion/sec) 17.6 GT/s
Microsoft DirectX / Shader Model 10.1 / 4.1
Idle / Max Board Power (TDP) 9 watts / 70 watts
GPU Thermal Threshold 105° C
The more interesting fact is that the GPU has an improved memory controller as it can be tied to gDDR5 right now. As such you'll see gDDR3 and gDDR5 models released on the market. We do recommend you to go with the gDDR5 model as the card is tied to a 128-bit wide memory bus; gDDR5 will double up memory bandwidth over 128-bit gDDR3 memory and that's a very important aspect inn terms of overall performance.
MSI's card is tagged as OC model. It thus comes with gDDR5 memory (512MB) and included into the package is MSI's popular Afterburner overclock software. The software will allow you increase a little extra voltage on the GPU, and then you can overclock the core and shader processor and of course the gDDR5 Samsung based memory.
So we feel in order for this product series to remain competitive, the pricing needs to stay under 100 USD at launch, unfortunately due to the customizations on the MSI board the pricing went up towards 105 USD -- and at that price point it is competing directly with the DX11 ready Radeon HD 5750 and Radeon HD 4770. But let's check it out.
If it is connectivity you are after, MSI does this well, SUB-D (VGA, DVI and a HDMI connector are present at the GT 240 OC Edition.
Cooler wise we see a simple yet robust chunk of metal tied to that GPU. As our tests will show, it cools really well, but is does take up two slots. And for a budget card that can be frowned upon a little. As you can see there's no power connector needed, meaning the card will consume less than 75 Watts. We estimate roughly 70 watts at full load actually.
This card comes with gDDR5 memory (128-bit) from Samsung.
Hardware installation
Installation of the product really is easy. Seat the card into the PC (no need to connect a 6-pin power connectors). You can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest GeForce driver and after a reboot all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.
Energy consumption
We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is downright low for a product of this caliber.
The methodology is simple: We have a device constantly monitoring the power draw from the PC. After we have run all our tests and benchmarks we look at the recorded maximum peak; and that's the bulls-eye you need to observe as the power peak is extremely important. Bear in mind that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC.
Our test system is a power hungry Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.75 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).
Our ASUS motherboard also allows adding power phases for stability, which we enabled as well. I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to these settings and then add the CPU overclock, water-cooling, additional cold cathode lights etc.
Keep that in mind. Our normal system power consumption is much higher than your average system.
The monitoring device is reporting a maximum system wattage peak at roughly 285, this is simply low and certainly remains within acceptable levels.
Recommended Power Supply
So here's my power supply recommendation:
The card requires you to have a 400 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total accumulated) at least 35 Amps available (accumulated) on ALL +12 volts rails.
There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:
bad 3D performance
crashing games
spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
freezing during gameplay
PSU overload can cause it to break down
The core temperature
Let's have a look at the temperatures this huge cooler offers.
We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming intensely and continuously, we literally stress the GPU 100% here.. We measured at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius.
Now we report at two stages the GPU in IDLE and under stress. Here's what we get returned:
Card setting
TEMP IDLE C
TEMP FULL C
MSI GeForce GT 240
31
47
As you can see we get very respectable temperatures returned. When we completely stress out the GPU 100% for a while, temperatures rise towards roughly 70 degrees C (158 F), that's fine.
But is the cooler very loud then?
Noise Levels coming from the graphics card
When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.
The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.
TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS
Jet takeoff (200 feet)
120 dBA
Construction Site
110 dBA
Intolerable
Shout (5 feet)
100 dBA
Heavy truck (50 feet)
90 dBA
Very noisy
Urban street
80 dBA
Automobile interior
70 dBA
Noisy
Normal conversation (3 feet)
60 dBA
Office, classroom
50 dBA
Moderate
Living room
40 dBA
Bedroom at night
30 dBA
Quiet
Broadcast studio
20 dBA
Rustling leaves
10 dBA
Barely audible
The noise levels coming from the card are perfectly fine, in idle you will not hear the card as we measured 39 DBa. Which is below the threshold of noise from the PC itself.
Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up. The card however remains steady and we measure roughly 43 dBA which a decent enough noise level. It's alright -- but not silent.
Test Environment & equipment
Here is where we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.
Windows 7 RTM 64-bit DirectX 9/10 End User Runtime ATI Catalyst 9.10 NVIDIA GeForce 195.50
Software benchmark suite
Resident Evil 5
Fallout 3
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Call of Duty: World at War
Mass Effect
Crysis WARHEAD
3DMark Vantage
A word about 'FPS'
What are we looking for in gaming performance wise? First off, obviously Guru3D tends to think that all games should be played at the best image quality (IQ) possible. There's a dilemma though, IQ often interferes with the performance of a graphics card. We measure this in FPS, the number of frames a graphics card can render per second, the higher it is the more fluently your game will display itself.
A game's frames per second (FPS) is a measured average of a series of tests. That test often is a time demo, a recorded part of the game which is a 1:1 representation of the actual game and its gameplay experience. After forcing the same image quality settings; this time-demo is then used for all graphics cards so that the actual measuring is as objective as can be.
Frames per second
Gameplay
<30 FPS
very limited gameplay
30-40 FPS
average yet very playable
40-60 FPS
good gameplay
>60 FPS
best possible gameplay
So if a graphics card barely manages less than 30 FPS, then the game is not very playable, we want to avoid that at all cost.
With 30 FPS up-to roughly 40 FPS you'll be very able to play the game with perhaps a tiny stutter at certain graphically intensive parts. Overall a very enjoyable experience. Match the best possible resolution to this result and you'll have the best possible rendering quality versus resolution, hey you want both of them to be as high as possible.
When a graphics card is doing 60 FPS on average or higher then you can rest assured that the game will likely play extremely smoothly at every point in the game, turn on every possible in-game IQ setting.
Over 100 FPS? You have either a MONSTER graphics card or a very old game.
Far Cry 2
Call of Duty 5: World at War
Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)
3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)
Watching 1080P MPEG / H.264 / MKV videos processed by your GPU
The x.264 format is often synonym with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. Especially the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with powerful processor to be able to playback such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stutters as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it.
Any popular file-format (XVID/DIVX/MPEG2/MPEG4/h.264/MKV/VC1/AVC) movie can be played on this little piece of software, without the need to install codecs and filters, and where it can, it will DXVA enable the playback. DXVA is short for Direct X Video Acceleration, and as you can tell from those four words alone, it'll try wherever it can to accelerate content over the GPU, offloading the CPU. Which is what we are after.
There's more to this software though:
A much missed feature with NVIDIA's PureVideo and ATI's UVD is the lack of a very simple function, yet massively important, pixel (image) sharpening.
If you watch a movie on a regular monitor, Purevideo playback is brilliant. But if you display the movie on a larger HD TV, you'll quickly wish you could enable little extra's like sharpening. I remember GeForce series 7 having this native supported from within the Forceware drivers. After GeForce series 8 was released, that feature was stripped away, and to date it has to be the most missed HTPC feature ever.
Media Player Classic has yet another advantage, as not only it tries to enable DXVA where possible through the video processor, it also can utilize the shader processors of your graphics cards and use it to post-process content.
A lot of shaders (small pieces of pixel shader code) can be executed within the GPU to enhance the image quality. MCP has this feature built in, you can even select several shaders like image sharpening, de-interlacing, combine them and thus run multiple shaders (enhancement) simultaneously. Fantastic features for high quality content playback.
Here you see MPC HT edition accelerating an x.264 version of Planet Earth -- 1080P. Thanks to the 96 available shader cores we can properly post-process and enhance image quality as well, shader based image sharpening is applied here.
The GPU is doing all the work as you can see the h.264 content within the x.264 file container is not even a slight bit accelerated over the CPU.
Overclocking & Tweaking
As most of you with most videocards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with Image Quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far.
Where should we go? Overclocking: By increasing the frequency of the videocard's memory and GPU, we can make the videocard increase its calculation clock cycles per second. It sounds hard, but it really can be done in less than a few minutes. I always tend to recommend to novice users and beginners not to increase the frequency any higher then 5% of the core and memory clock. Example: If your card runs at 600 MHz (which is pretty common these days) then I suggest you don't increase the frequency any higher than 30 to 50 MHz.
More advanced users push the frequency often way higher. Usually when your 3D graphics start to show artifacts such as white dots ("snow"), you should back down 10-15 MHz and leave it at that. Usually when you are overclocking too hard, it'll start to show artifacts, empty polygons or it will even freeze. Carefully find that limit and then back down at least 20 MHz from the moment you notice an artifact. Look carefully and observe well. I really wouldn't know why you need to overclock today's tested card anyway, but we'll still show it ;)
All in all... do it at your own risk.
Above you can see the overclocked results for Resident Evil 5, same image quality settings as before.
Original
This sample
Overclocked with AfterBurner
Core Clock: 550MHz
Core Clock: 550MHz
Core Clock:640MHz
Shader Clock: 1360MHz
Shader Clock: 1360MHz
Shader Clock:1554MHz
Memory Clock: 1700MHz
Memory Clock: 1794MHz
Memory Clock: 2011MHz
So we could not push the card much further really as we'd run into issues, if you however jam some extra volts into the GPU 0-- you might reach 650~700 MHz on that core.
The Verdict
You know -- if the pricing comes down a little the GT 240 really is nice card. NVIDIA however is now facing a problem ... the technology might be changed on their end, but on the end-user side it's the same performance and the same feature set we have been seeing for years now -- and that makes this release a little dull for you, the consumer.
I know everybody (myself included) really wants to see new DX11 class NVIDIA products. Well, expect Q1 2010 for NVIDIA's first real DX11 product releases. Until then we'll have to wait and sit out what is offered. If applicable to you, cards like these do offer true value for money -- but we can't ignore the fact that NVIDIA is a step behind ATI. As for the same money you can pick up the DX10 Radeon HD 4770 offering better, much better game performance -- throw in another 20 bucks and you are already at Radeon HD 5750 with much better overall performance and features.
That said, make no mistake -- these facts don't make this a bad product though. Contrary, it really is a nice product especially when you take some other factors into consideration. You can not rule out the fact that NVIDIA is really paving the way with CUDA. Their GPUs slowly are transforming into more generic application based accelerators and though you as a gamer might not like to hear that, it is a concept we'll all have to get used to. GPUs now and in the future will not be just about gaming anymore. ATI has something similar called Stream, but on this segment NVIDIA clearly has the overall lead.
So if you have been living under a rock and never bought a graphics cards in say the last two years, then yes this might be an interesting product for you -- if you are on a very low budget. The GT 240 is definitely a decent enough product especially when you opt the gDDR5 version that is. Overall performance is as expected roughly at GeForce 9600 GT level.
MSI recently released their Afterburner overclock software which comes with voltage tweaking for this card as well. The combo really is golden as you can push the card extremely hard. MSI's overall implementation of the board is nice as well. Dark design, the cooler works really good and is not at all noisy and a quick peek at the components reveal that there's nothing other than quality materials used ensuring utmost stability and a long lifespan.
So where do we see the GT 240 .. ? Well budget systems that require some sort of GPU acceleration or hey .. people with low-profile monitors that like to play their games up-to say 1280x1024. Where the card would really shine is in a HTPC; owners would really like this product. Native HDMI and then the the 96 shader processors really help out with software like Media Placer Classic HT edition, where you can use the shader processors to enhance and post-process image quality -- very important.
So while we really wish NVIDIA would have released DX11 class product by now we can say can assume that the GT 240 is the last desktop graphics card released by NVIDIA this year. And sure I'll agree with you on this, a card like this does not bring anything exciting to the table technology wise, however NVIDIA's strong approach to using the GPU for other things than gaming, does lift a product like this upwards. It's good for very low-end gaming, HTPC's and overall desktop business usage where you can accelerate software like Flash 10, Photoshop and Transcoding like Mediashow Espresso offers. Pricng wise we feel it's a little too expensive, if prices come down a little further to say 75~80 USD, then the product starts to make really good sense.
Bottom line: the GT 240 cards overall will be priced reasonably. MSI offers the card as tested today for a bit more steep 100~105 USD, however you do get the gDDR5 version and some excellent build/component quality. The MSI GeForce GT 240 512MB DDR5 OC edition -- if applicable to you definitely comes recommended. But if you are hunting down game performance, then there are better alternatives out there at that sub 100 USD market.
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