Without any official mention from NVIDIA, a new GPU has today emerged from the Californian graphics giant in the form of the GeForce GT 240.
The card - NVIDIA's latest 40nm offering - is the logical successor to the ageing GeForce 9600 GT and takes its place at the foot of the mid-range space by offering a little more performance than NVIDIA's existing 40nm cards, the low-end GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220.
Shipping with a GPU operating at 550MHz, the GeForce GT 240 features 96 stream processors clocked at 1,340MHz and comes equipped with either GDDR3 or GDDR5 memory, in 512MB or 1,024MB capacities, hooked up to a 128-bit interface.
Sounds like a decent enough card, and NVIDIA's partners are lining up with a wave of customised solutions. Palit, for example, already has overclocked Sonic edition cards - equipped with a 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer and the promise of 10 per cent higher performance right out of the box.
As with the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, the all-new GeForce GT 240 offers full support for Direct X 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1. There's nothing here to give AMD a run for its money, but for those in the market for a low-to-mid-range solution capable of facilitating NVIDIA's PhysX and CUDA acceleration, the GeForce GT 240 looks a decent bet.
We'd like to be able to give you a definitive verdict, but neither NVIDIA or its partners have thus far been able to provide a sample. Case in point, it's telling that the card is yet to appear at UK retail. It'll need to surface at below the £70 mark to remain competitive, we reckon.
Official press releases:
Palit announces the world first 1024MB GDDR5 GT240 Sonic
BIOSTAR Launches GeForce GT240 Graphics Card
Inno3D GeForce GT 240 for the Digital World
Discover ECS New GPU Technology NVIDIA® GeForceTM GT 240 Graphics Card Series
