NVIDIA's recent introduction of 40 nm graphics processors is a wise move from the company's standpoint, as it allows the company to take baby-steps on the new silicon fabrication technology. The company started off with two entry-level GPUs in the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, and has gradually upscaled them. This release marks the company's first graphics card to make use of the GDDR5 memory standard, which is twice as fast as GDDR3, clock-for-clock. To begin with, the GeForce GT 240 does come across as noteworthy, perhaps not because of its initial price, which history has shown to have little bearing on a product's performance on the shelves, but that it is able to deliver decent performance levels for the amount of power it consumes, perhaps a fruition of the 40 nm process.
Axle's GeForce GT 240 performance is still 15% away from the GeForce 9600 GT, but the 50% higher shader core count comes to its rescue in recent games. The GeForce 9600 GT seems to benefit from its higher number of raster operation units. In simple terms, while older games seem to perform well on the 9600 GT, newer, shader-intensive games benefit from the more powerful shader domain of the GeForce GT 240.
Thanks to the new 40 nm process, the card does not require an additional power connector. It also scores with an extremely low power draw of only 15 Watts in idle. During gaming it needs roughly 50W. Overclocking was very easy and yielded a healthy overclock, we gained over 18%. Unfortunately the fan noise was not such a pleasant experience. The fan is noisy in idle and stays at roughly the same speed in idle and load. Even though an Arctic Cooling heatsink is used it seems that Axle did not optimize the fan settings to work best with the AC cooler.
The Axle GeForce GT 240 makes for a decent buy for a cool, low-power graphics card that can handle games at medium-thru-low resolutions, if only it had a better price. With GeForce 9800 GT accelerators easily available around the $100 mark, the $110 price-tag simply doesn't cut it. Hopefully, the prices will come down in the near future.