MSI GeForce GT 240 review - Introduction

NVIDIA going budget with the GeForce GT 240

NVIDIA today adds a new GeForce graphics card to their product lineup. The product is nothing new in terms of features and performance in your end, but on the chipset side however, this is a completely new silicon made at the new 40nm manufacturing node at TSMC.

Yes guys and girls, today the GeForce GT 240 sees the light. In several ways an interesting product as it does offer decent value for money. GT 240 is aimed somewhere in-between the GT 220 and as NVIDIA states, GeForce 9800 GT in terms of performance and feature set. Price wise we are looking at a fairly low sub-100 USD product series -- which will likely drop to say 80 USD fairly quick in the weeks to come..

GeForce GT240 is designed for a the lower segment of the mainstream market and comes with support for DX10.1
Yes unfortunately for NVIDIA they still do not offer DX11 products in any shape or form, which is somewhat of a miss anno Q4 2009. GeForce GT240 comes packed with 96 shader cores and features GDDR3 memory, however if you throw in an extra tenner -- you can get a 128-bit gDDR5 memory version as well -- giving the card some more breathing space in terms of memory bandwidth and in the end overall performance.

Built on the GT215 core, the GeForce GT 240 graphics card thus is based on a 40nm GPU, manufactured at TSMC, will boast support for DirectX 10.1 and will be featured with 96 Stream processors.

Word on the street is that these puppies overclock like a friggin lunatic -- so we'll have to check that out. We picked up the GeForce GT 240 from MSI which comes packed with a nice design and some really good connectivity -- let's have a look shall we.