Gainward GT240

A little card than just about can from Gainward.

The GT240 card was never meant for performance super-stardom, fitting into the amateur category as tightly as Mario fits into his form-fitting blue pants. Thankfully this offering is slightly more advanced than your average plumber's graphics card, and there are a few key things that keep Gainward's card flowing along nicely. Purring along underneath the sink of this card is a 40nm GT215 core that packs 96 stream processors, also offering a 128-bit memory interface for some decent bandwidth to the onboard GDDR5 memory chips, of which there are a total of eight.

First and foremost is an impressive memory boost from the now-very-average 512MB of reference memory, reaching a doubled amount of 1GB. There's also a mild factory overclock applied to the core and the memory to the tune of 35MHz and 45MHz respectively. The price of course attracts a premium of $15 or so for this model, but the benefits of all this extra stuff are quite clear when looking at the card's performance - but we'll talk about that in a minute.

Ripping the card out of the box reveals a bright red PCB that should fit in pretty much every case, and it's a shade larger in length when compared to a 5670. There's no additional PCIe power connector needed here, as the core devours a meagre 69W of power - which is underneath the maximum slot specification of 75W. Strangely there isn't a SLI nipple along the top of the card, however you'd be pretty mad to get one of these with thoughts of SLI down the track. In pretty much every case, buying a more powerful single card is the best upgrade.

Display outputs cover HDMI, DVI and VGA: not going to set anyone's world on fire, especially compared to ATI's triple digital connections. Still, it's a decent amount of flexibility, and with NVIDIA's recent announcement of 3D VISION over a triple-monitor setup (digital only) it's a nice sign that outputs are increasing. Again though, you'd be mad to want to run 3D VISION on a low-end card like this.

The heatsink used here couldn't be simpler, consisting of a lump of aluminium with extruded fins, and a decent fan whacked on top. There is a black plastic shroud around the front of the card, but rather than working to direct airflow any specific way it seems merely there to keep cables out of the fan. Annoyingly, the fan is connected via a 2-pin cable that prevents software control over the speed, and therefore noise, of the card. This didn't prove too distracting under use, remaining at 57.5dBA regardless of load, but is still a little restrictive. Idle temperatures were quite surprisingly cool, sitting at 38 degrees, but this rocketed to 61 degrees at load - quite high for a GT240.

Overclocking performance didn't seem to suffer under these increased temperatures though, with a maximum clockspeed increase of sixteen per cent (679MHz) reached relatively easily. Memory speeds refused to increase at all, most likely due to the bare memory chips running at a blistering temperature under any kind of load. We're not talking blistering as in "ooh that's a little warm", but more like "where'd I leave the skin on my finger?!". Definitely make sure there's some airflow there!

Game performance was much better than reference versions of the card, with Crysis being playable on lower settings, and surprisingly even GRID managed to run. The extra memory headroom and clockspeed even gave a boost to both 3DMark programs to the tune of 3-500 points, and it's definitely worth spending the little bit extra. In all, this is a good card for those looking for budget gaming at higher resolutions, and it's overclockable to boot.