Introduction

Currently NVIDIA is releasing new versions of their lower end graphics card series. All new cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the GT216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the GT218 processor. This week marks the release of the GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's first GDDR5 memory card. It uses the GT215 GPU which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. While the G 210 and GT 220 were positioned in the low-end segment, the GT 240 will offer performance similar to the GeForce 9600 GT, yet considerably below the aging GeForce 9800 GT.

NVIDIA lets partners build a wide range of different configurations, 512 MB or 1 GB of memory, GDDR3 or GDDR5, choice of DVI, VGA, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. Palit has designed their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution on their Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic. In addition to that the card uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and features clocks that are higher than the reference design clock speeds.

Packaging

Palit's mascot, the Green Frog makes the package easily identifiable as a Palit product. Even though the front shows "Sonic Edition" (in fairly small letters), the actual clock speeds are nowhere to be found.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

Palit has chosen to design their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution. A transparent peel-off-foil on the cooler (not pictured here) protects it from scratches.


Palit has designed the card to occupy two slots in the system, with the cooler being about 1.5 slots tall. This means that even in a full case there will be plenty of space for the cooler to suck in air.


The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and one HDMI port. For a low-end graphics card, this is a very reasonable output configuration since many low-end PC users still use CRTs. For media PC users the HDMI output enables an easy way to hook up their graphics card to the big screen without any adapter cables or converters.
As mentioned before, NVIDIA has slightly changed how their HDMI Audio works. Instead of connecting an SPDIF output from your sound card to the graphics card, the card features its own audio device now. According to NVIDIA "fully uncompressed 7.1 LPCM" is supported, as far as I know the CPU will take care of decoding the audio from other formats into LPCM. Please note that this means that you can not send encoded formats like DTS over the wire to be processed in the TV/receiver. 7.1 LPCM is basically 8 uncompressed WAV streams being sent at the same time.


While there are no SLI connectors, it is possible to put two of these cards in SLI mode for better performance and data will be transferred via the PCI-Express bus.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.