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Gainward GeForce GT 240 Review

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On December 1, 2009, 12:25 AM

Last October Nvidia released a brand new graphics card aimed at the budget market, the GeForce GT 220, and unlike the shady GTS 250 this was actually a new product that deserved to be part of the 200 series. Built using a last generation manufacturing process and given the codename GT216, you'd be forgiven to be unaware of all this, as the 40nm GeForce GT 220 turned out to be a dud.

In terms of performance we were disappointed to find the theoretical bandwidth of 25.3GB/s placed this card alongside the old GeForce 9500 GT. Not everyone can afford a high-end graphics card, of course, so we welcomed the addition for the sake of competition. But this is where things got even more ridiculous, as Nvidia decided to slap an $80 price tag on the GT 220, even when the far superior Radeon HD 4670 from ATI had been retailing for less for quite some time.


Prices have dropped slightly since then, but our opinion on it hasn't changed much. Needless to say our expectations for the new GeForce GT 240 are underwhelming, but that's not to say we won't give it a fair go. The card is said to be considerably more powerful than the GT 220, though in terms of performance it should still sit well below the GeForce 9800 GT. We really hope the tweaked version from Gainward that we are reviewing today can surprise us, so let's move on to check it out in more detail.

Read the full review
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  1. omg you guys don't know shit about this card! i mean this is far better than the 9800GT which is a DDR3 card and the GT240 is a GDDR5 and is a lot faster! and the GT240 came 17th in the top 20 gaming cards while the 9800gt came 19th! :P

    and benchmarks say all. i tested the 9800gt and the GT240 on the same PC and the GT240 had greater FPS and it came to my attention that the 9800gt wasn't able to run GTA 4 on max (it was but with lag) and the GT240 did just fine.

  2. NECRO ALERT!

  3. Staff

    omg you guys don't know **** about this card! i mean this is far better than the 9800GT which is a DDR3 card and the GT240 is a GDDR5 and is a lot faster!

    Honestly I have no idea what you are rambling on about but I think I understood the memory comment.

    Just so you are aware the 9800 GT has a memory bandwidth of 57.6GB/s. The GTX 240 has a bandwidth of 54.4GB/s when using GDDR5 memory and 32GB/s with GDDR3.

    The 9800 GT also has a considerably more complex core configuration...

  4. omg you guys don't know **** about this card! i mean this is far better than the 9800GT which is a DDR3 card and the GT240 is a GDDR5 and is a lot faster!

    Before you go around telling people (and experienced people at that) that they don't know ****, perhaps you should 'learn some **** yourself.

    Equipping a card with GDDR5 does not automatically make it faster than another card. there are many other considerations that make up the speed and throughput of a GPU...or any other electronic component for that matter. Like shader units,ROP's, Texture units, bus width , etc so on, and so forth.

    the GT240 came 17th in the top 20 gaming cards while the 9800gt came 19th! :P

    What was the criteria for this list?, it certainly was not frame rates. The GT 240 in any form gets its *** beat by the GT 9800 across the board.

    and benchmarks say all

    yes they do....why don't you try reading them? why...there is one right here at TS that shows the GT 240 coming in behind the GT 9800 in every single bench run.

    i tested the 9800gt and the GT240 on the same PC and the GT240 had greater FPS

    You really should learn how to benchmark....because you are the only one to reach that conclusion.

    and it came to my attention that the 9800gt wasn't able to run GTA 4 on max (it was but with lag) and the GT240 did just fine.

    Well aside from the fact that GTA IV is one of the most CPU dependent games in recent memory, do you live in some time bending black hole whereby electronic devices mysteriously change their properties and characteristics when they land in your hands?

    Oh here is another mystery... here is the Palit GT 240, equipped with a full 1GB of blazing GDDR5, losing to a lowly GT 9800 that only has a measly 512MB of GDDR3....but how can this be!! oh the humanity!

    (hint) adding an extra 512MB of memory to VGA's of this low end of the spectrum is useless in practice...it's just to make you feel good when your buddy has the 512MB version. See there?...you learned something.

    and I leave you with the quoted conclusion from PC Perspective's review of both the GDDR3 and GDDR5 version of the GT 240;

    As I said in our testing setup page, the GeForce 9800 GT is still a widely available card and in all cases was faster than the GT 240s we tested today.

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