Installation, Testing and Comparison:
Since there is no need for external power connections or the need for an HDMI adapter, installation was very easy. Just pop the card in and you’re done really.
I installed it in my secondary gaming/HTPC computer that is hooked up via HDMI to my Vizio 47” HDTV.
Specs for system are:
Intel C2Q9650 with Noctua NH-U12P Cooler
4gig Corsair XMS3 DDR3 Ram
Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Motherboard
Liteon Blu-Ray DVD/Rw
Kingston 40gb SSD Boot Drive
Seagate Barracuda 1TB
Samsung 750gb
USB 3.0 PCIEx1 Card
bGears b-Enspirer 7.1 PCI sound card
NZXT 800watt PSU
NZXT Tempest EVO Case
I run Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on this system.
Before I got the GT240 for review I was actually using the Sparkle Calibre GTX 260 in my system. I know the 260 is going to perform better than the GT 240 will, but I ran the usual benchmarks anyway.
First up is 3DMark06:
The results are not as bad as I expected really…
Next up is 3DMark Vantage. Profile is performance with the resolution set to 1920×1080.
No surprises here, the GTX260 is better.
I had to run Crysis just out of curiosity. All settings were set to High, running DX10 with 2X AA.
Very poor results from the GT240, but then I didn’t expect it to do well, then again the GTX260 didn’t do so hot either.
I also decided to run Far Cry 2 as well with settings:
Demo(Ranch Small), 1920×1080 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(2x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Optimal), Vegetation(High), Shading(High), Terrain(High), Geometry(High), Post FX(High), Texture(High), Shadow(High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)
So the GT240 is not a video card for gaming, but I think we all knew that already.
Next up I decided to check power consumption of both cards. To do this I used a Seasonic Power Angel and monitor the wattage being used by the system. This is the overall wattage of the system, but we can get a good idea of the power usage by looking at the differences. I hooked it up and looked at it basically and recorded the Peak wattage at Boot, Idle and Under Load.
While booting the system will actually use quite a bit of power. To get the idle usage I turned it on and let it sit while monitoring the CPU usage, when it leveled out I then started checking the wattage being used. We want to know the load wattage for the video card, so I ran both 3DMark06 and 3DMarkVantage and check to see just how high the wattage was.
This isn’t exactly a perfect method of doing this I know, but it gives us a general idea of power consumption.
In the graph below is the peak wattage used for Boot, Idle and Load, or the highest the meter read at each time.
As you can see at load the GT240 uses about 80watts less power than the GTX260 does, at idle we see about 50 watts less.
As far as noise level is concerned, I had to check and see is the fan was running actually, I added no additional noise to the system at all. This could be a decent card for an HTPC setup I’m sure.
Speaking of HTPCs, I popped in a Blu-Ray disc and played some other HD content and had no issues with it.
The cost of this card isn’t too bad, I found it on Amazon new for $104.79 actually from Geeks.com. Looking at the Geeks site though this card is selling new for $87.99 which is a great price really, and it’s listed as ‘almost gone’ so if you’re interested you might want to hop on over there right now and grab one.