Zotac GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition Review

Name: Zotac GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition Review
Brand: Zotac

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 09:01 AM EDT

NVIDIA is launching a new mainstream graphics card today, aimed squarely at consumers in the market for a relatively low-cost upgrade from an integrated graphics solution or older entry-level GPU. The new GeForce GT 240, features a GPU outfitted with 96 processor cores, 8 ROP units, and 32 texture filtering units. In addition, the GT 240 GPU is manufactured using a 40nm process, it features a GDDR5 memory controller (that's also compatible with GDDR3), and unlike NVIDIA's current high-end GPUs, the GT 240 is DirectX 10.1 compatible.

Although its specifications aren't terribly high-end in light of NVIDIA's more powerful GeForces, the GT 240 is actually more advanced than its counterparts in a number of respects. The GeForce GT 240's full list of specifications are below, followed by some images of the first retail-ready GT 240 to arrive in the lab, which came by way of Zotac...

Zotac's GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition

NVIDIA GeForce GT 240

Specifications and Features

As you can see in the list above, NVIDIA's reference specifications for the GeForce GT 240 call for a 550MHz GPU clock, with shaders clocked at 1360MHz, and either GDDR3 memory clocked at 1GHz or GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.7GHz. At those specifications, the card offers peak textured fillrate of 17.6GTexels/s with 32GB/s (GDDR3) or 54.4GB/s (GDDR5). Also note the total board power, which is nice and low. Idle power of the GT 240 is rated at only 9 watts and peak power is only 70 watts. As such, the GeForce GT 240 doesn't require any supplimentel power.

Zotac's GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition

The Zotac GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition we received for testing is somewhat of an upgrade from NVIDIA's reference design. Zotac's offering sports a 600MHz core, with 1460MHz shaders, and 512MB of 2000MHz GDDR5 memory (4000MHz effective). The cooler on the card is is relatively large and covers the GPU and memory on the front side of the card, with a cooling fan right in middle. It is only a single-slot solution and proved to be relatively quiet during testing. Outputs on the card consist of single HDMI, VGA, and dual-link DVI outputs, of which two can be used simultaneously.

Zotac's bundle for their GeForce GT 240 AMP! Edition consists of user's and quick-installation guides, a placard listing offers for a number of CUDA-accelerated applications like Badaboom abd vReveal, a driver CD, case badge, an HDMI-to-DVI adapter, and even a pair of 3D glasses.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, DirectX, graphics, Zotac, GPU, video, DX10.1

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com