NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 240: The Card That Doesn't Matter
by Ryan Smith on January 6, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is another foliage-heavy game. Low-end cards can still do decently here, so long as the texture quality isn’t cranked up to the point where it saturates the 512MB and lesser cards.
Far Cry 2 is fairly notorious around here for dragging down 512MB cards, and with the GT 240 there is no exception. Any lead offered by GDDR5 melts away thanks to only having 512MB of RAM. The DDR3 GT 240 still doesn’t win here, but it doesn’t lose either, the only time this will happen. This of course goes out the window once we turn our setting slightly down, where the GDDR5 GT 240s are no longer handicapped and resume their lead over the DDR3 GT 240.
At any rate, this really isn’t that great of a game for any of the GT 240s. At lower resolutions, the Radeon 4670 manages to squeeze in above the GT 240s, a battle the GT 240 shouldn’t be losing. The near-parity with the 9600 GT doesn’t look much better, either.
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samspqr - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
the cards are in shops already, firmly in 9800gt territory, and nearly 20% more expensive than 9600gt... but at these prices it means you're just paying a $10 premium in order to have the newer card; ati's replacement of 4870/4850 with 5770/5750 meant a much bigger premium for new-but-equally-performing tech (you had bigger power savings there, though)and, of course, I missed some comparisons with ATI cards in the conclusion, something to the tune of: "in any case, it is just sad that nvidia is unable to manufacture new chips to compete with anything ati has, other than a 4670"
nafhan - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
The reason ATI can have a big premium on the 57XX (and 58XX) is that they've got no competition. The 57XX series in particular has PLENTY of room to drop in price as it's a much simpler card to build than the 4850/70 cards that it is replacing. Nvidia has similar performance for a similar price, but it's based on older tech with higher power consumption. The prices will probably stick until Nvidia comes out with a real challenger for the 5 series (i.e. Fermi).Spoelie - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Why is the GT240 only compared to nvidia cards in the entire review (except for the benchmark images)? It would be to the benefit of the reader to also know how it compares to ATi in the value for money area. What is the current price of say a 4670/4770/4850 in 512MB/1GB configurations and how would that compare in terms of value?Also, with such a small impact, I think the evga card should have been left out of the factory-clock benchmark graphs for future lookup convenience & easy relative comparison. The performance difference compared to the normal card could have been summarized on a dedicated page.
pugster - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a...=AFC-Ben...Saw on newegg that you can get this 240gt with 1gb ddr3 memory for $58 after rebate.
plague911 - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I think the over all point was that you may as well not even consider the GT240. If you wanted a generic ATI/NVIDIA comparison you would use a different nvidia card. Not to say that nvidia may not beat ATI in a comparison but a different nvidia would be a better choice for the comparisonRyan Smith - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
The 4800 and 4700 series have effectively been discontinued, the remaining cards are fairly rare and usually overpriced. There's little to gain comparing the GT 240 to a 4770 or 4850, as you can no longer get ahold of those cards for reasonable prices most of the time.That leaves the 4670, which the GT 240 beats.
hydrocarbon - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
I can grab a 1GB 4850 off NewEgg now for a hundred and ten bucks, or a 512MB for a hundred. "Rare", sure, but "overpriced"? They're cheaper now than they've ever been, especially if you consider those are prices w/o rebates.MadMan007 - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Just FYI there is such a thing as the used video card market ;) while you can't compare pricing yourself and include it in the written details a savvy user who is looking at used cards will be able to do so.Taft12 - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
Yes, but bear in mind the lack of warranty (XFX double lifetime notwithstanding) and unknown overclocking/stress history. These things make used video card purchases a non-starter.Taft12 - Wednesday, January 6, 2010 - link
... a non-starter IMHO of course