Gainward's GeForce GT 240

The Gainward GeForce GT 240 is a small, compact graphics card that measures just 17.5cm long. Although Nvidia's reference design only calls for a single slot cooler, the card has been upgraded with a larger and much quieter dual slot design that includes a 75mm fan instead of the stock 60mm version.

At its thickest the heatsink measures 1.5cm, while it is also 11.5cm long and 8.5cm wide. Given that the GT215 GPU has a TDP of just 69 watts, the card's cooling setup is more than sufficient to hold its own and should help increase the overclocking potential of the GeForce GT 240.

Core and memory reference speeds for the GT 240 are 550MHz and 1700MHz (GDDR5), respectively. However, with their special "GeForce GT240 1024MB GDDR5 Golden Sample" Gainward has bumped these numbers by around 6 and 11 percent, respectively, as the core now operates at 585MHz and the memory at 1890MHz.

Gainward uses Samsung K4G10325FE-HC05 memory chips, which are rated to operate at 2000MHz. We expect to find quite a bit of overclocking headroom with this graphics card as a result.

A reference GeForce GT 240 card should produce 54.4GB/s of memory bandwidth using a 128-bit memory bus. This is slightly less than the 57.6GB/s offered by the old GeForce 9600 GT on a 256-bit bus using GDDR3 memory, but Gainward's factory overclocking should provide a nice memory bandwidth boost to ~60.48GB/s.

Although Nvidia mandates that GDDR5 cards only come equipped with 512MB of memory, Gainward has upgraded their product to support the full 1024MB frame buffer. This PCI Express 2.0 x16 graphics card is built around the GT215 architecture offering 96 shader units and a 40nm design process. On the connectivity front, the card supports dual-link DVI as well as HDMI and VGA.