Zotac GeForce GT 240

Full Review

After a slew of ATI Radeon cards, it is indeed refreshing to get an Nvidia card into our labs. The Zotac GeForce GT 240 is the newest Nvidia based card that is aimed at budget rigs. However, that doesn’t mean that it shirks on performance; instead it performs as well as both the Palit Radeon HD 4670 and the Sparkle GeForce 9600GT, both of which are our best performers in the sub-5K market.

The stand out feature of the GT 240 is that it is one of the few Nvidia cards that support DirectX 10.1. It also has 512MB of DDR5 RAM, a core clocked at 550MHz and a 128-bit memory interface. In terms of design, it is the Zotac GT 220’s elder brother. It is bigger and wider and also sports a heat-sink and an embedded fan. It also has three ports- HDMI, DVI and VGA. Zotac has bundled the requisite manuals, CDs with documentation and drivers and an HDMI-DVI connector. A neat addition is a pair of paper 3D glasses that work surprisingly well with Nvidia’s 3D vision technology.

We started off our performance benchmarks on the GT 240 with 3D Mark ’06 in which it scored 10,391 points. In 3D Mark Vantage’s Entry preset, it scored 24,678 points, the highest score we have seen from a budget card. In our gaming benchmarks too, the GT 240 performed very well. In Crysis at 1280x1024 4xAA and High settings, it managed 20 fps; in Far Cry 2 at the same resolution and AA and Very High settings, it was able to garner 36 fps and in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., again at the same resolution, AA and High settings, it again scored 36 fps. In all instances in our gaming benchmarks, the fight between the HD 4670, the 9600GT and the GT 240 was very close and at least performance-wise, there is absolutely nothing to separate the three cards.

Bottom Line

The Zotac GeForce GT 240 is priced at Rs. 5,600 and you can bet on that price-tag falling in the coming months. Even at this price the card looks like a very good buy and in the future even more so.