EVGA’s GT 240 - Testing a powerful low-cost AIB

Posted by Robert Dow on December 15th 2009 | Comments Closed
Categories: Hardware Review
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Figure 1: Pmark for midrange AIBs. (Source Jon Peddie Research)

We don’t just test super high-end AIBs here at Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs; we look at any AIB that is novel or interesting, or controversial. So we decided to take a look at some midrange AIBs, and in particular Nvidia’s newest offering, the GT 240. EVGA loaned us a board for examination and we put it through the usual tests.

It’s appropriate to look at midrange AIBs at this time of year and in this economy. Consumers looking for a gift, or for themselves, are looking for value in their purchases and the midrange AIBs offer plenty of that. Not everyone plays demanding graphics games all the time. In fact, one of the most popular games out there now, World of Warcraft doesn’t really need super high-end graphics for an enjoyable experience but it definitely benefits. A midrange AIB will provide most of the performance and sometimes at considerably lower prices.

So with that in mind we examined the midrange AIBs.

Pmark

The Pmark score shows the new EVGA GT 240 AIB to be the hands down best board available today.

The Pmark is a three parameter test

The PMark

Where:

  • Performance is expressed in 3DMark Pre-set Extreme Vantage score
  • Price is expressed in US dollars (NextTag data used)
  • Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

The EVGA GT 240 comes with several built-in Nvidia chip features such as GeForce 3D Vision stereo capability (glasses not included), Nvidia’s PureVideo Technology, PhysX-ready, and Cuda ready.

Table 1: Pmark scores for the HD 5750 and GT 240. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
HD 5750 GT 240Ratio
Vantage 4110 1931 1.13
Price $145.00 $100.00 0.45
Power 86.00 70.00 0.23
Pmark 0.33 0.28 0.19
Table 2: Comparison of specifications for ATI HD 5750 and Nvidia GT 240. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)
HD 5750 GT 240
Process 40nm 40nm
Transistors 1.04B 727M
Engine Clock 700 MHz 550 MHz
Stream Processors 720 96
Compute Performance 1.008 TFLOPS 385 GFLOPS
ROPS 16 8
Texture Units 36 32
Texture Fillrate 25.2 GTexels/s 17.6 GT/s
Pixel Fillrate 11.2 Gpixel/s 8.8 GP/s
Memory Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Memory Clock 1150 MHz 3400 MHz
Memory Bandwidth 73.6 GB/s 54.4 GB/s
Maximum Board Power 86W 69W
Memory on board 512MB—1GB 512MB—1GB
Idle Board Power 16W  
Price $145 $100

What do we think?

Graphics AIBs continue to be real value for money—you get what you pay for. As the data table above shows, the ratios of difference between the $100 EVGA AIB and the $150 ATI give you an interesting menu: max performance—ATI, best price—EVGA.

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