Introduction

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Currently NVIDIA is releasing new versions of their lower end graphics card series. All new cards are based on NVIDIA's first 40 nm graphics processors. The GeForce GT 220 uses the GT216 GPU, while the G 210 uses the GT218 processor. This week marks the release of the GeForce GT 240 - NVIDIA's first GDDR5 memory card. It uses the GT215 GPU which is made in a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. While the G 210 and GT 220 were positioned in the low-end segment, the GT 240 will offer performance similar to the GeForce 9600 GT, yet considerably below the aging GeForce 9800 GT.

NVIDIA lets partners build a wide range of different configurations, 512 MB or 1 GB of memory, GDDR3 or GDDR5, choice of DVI, VGA, DisplayPort and HDMI outputs. Palit has designed their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution on their Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic. In addition to that the card uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and features clocks that are higher than the reference design clock speeds.

<table border="1" class="resulttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<th></th>
<td>Radeon 
HD 4550</td>
<td>GeForce 
9500 GT</td>
<td>GeForce 
GT 220</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 4670</td>
<td>GeForce 
GT 240</td>
<td>Palit 
GT 240</td>
<td>GeForce 
9600 GT</td>
<td>GeForce 
9800 GT</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Shader units </th>
<td align="right">80</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">48</td>
<td align="right">320</td>
<td align="right">96</td>
<td align="right">96</td>
<td align="right">64</td>
<td align="right">112</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>ROPs</th>
<td align="right">4</td>
<td align="right">8</td>
<td align="right">8</td>
<td align="right">8</td>
<td align="right">8</td>
<td align="right">8</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>GPU</th>
<td align="right">RV710</td>
<td align="right">G96</td>
<td align="right">GT216</td>
<td align="right">RV730</td>
<td align="right">GT215</td>
<td align="right">GT215</td>
<td align="right">G94</td>
<td align="right">G92</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Transistors</th>
<td align="right">242M</td>
<td align="right">314M</td>
<td align="right">486M</td>
<td align="right">512M</td>
<td align="right">727M</td>
<td align="right">727M</td>
<td align="right">505M </td>
<td align="right">754M </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Size</th>
<td align="right">512 MB</td>
<td align="right">256 MB / 
512 MB</td>
<td align="right">512 MB / 
1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">512 MB</td>
<td align="right">512 MB / 
1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">512 MB </td>
<td align="right">512 MB </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Bus Width </th>
<td align="right">64 bit</td>
<td align="right">128 bit</td>
<td align="right">128 bit</td>
<td align="right">128 bit</td>
<td align="right">128 bit</td>
<td align="right">128 bit</td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Core Clock</th>
<td align="right">600 MHz</td>
<td align="right">550 MHz</td>
<td align="right">625 MHz</td>
<td align="right">750 MHz</td>
<td align="right">550 MHz</td>
<td align="right">585 MHz</td>
<td align="right">650 MHz </td>
<td align="right">600 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Clock</th>
<td align="right">400 MHz</td>
<td align="right">900 MHz</td>
<td align="right">790 MHz / 
1012 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1000 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1700 MHz / 
1000 MHz</td>
<td align="right">1890 MHz</td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Price</th>
<td align="right">$45</td>
<td align="right">$45</td>
<td align="right">$69 -
$79</td>
<td align="right">$67</td>
<td align="right">$99</td>
<td align="right">$110</td>
<td align="right">$80</td>
<td align="right">$90</td>
</tr>
</table>

Packaging

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Palit's mascot, the Green Frog makes the package easily identifiable as a Palit product. Even though the front shows "Sonic Edition" (in fairly small letters), the actual clock speeds are nowhere to be found.

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You will receive:

Graphics card
Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

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Palit has chosen to design their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution. A transparent peel-off-foil on the cooler (not pictured here) protects it from scratches.

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Palit has designed the card to occupy two slots in the system, with the cooler being about 1.5 slots tall. This means that even in a full case there will be plenty of space for the cooler to suck in air.

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The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and and one HDMI port. For a low-end graphics card, this is a very reasonable output configuration since many low-end PC users still use CRTs. For media PC users the HDMI output enables an easy way to hook up their graphics card to the big screen without any adapter cables or converters.
As mentioned before, NVIDIA has slightly changed how their HDMI Audio works. Instead of connecting an SPDIF output from your sound card to the graphics card, the card features its own audio device now. According to NVIDIA "fully uncompressed 7.1 LPCM" is supported, as far as I know the CPU will take care of decoding the audio from other formats into LPCM. Please note that this means that you can not send encoded formats like DTS over the wire to be processed in the TV/receiver. 7.1 LPCM is basically 8 uncompressed WAV streams being sent at the same time.

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While there are no SLI connectors, it is possible to put two of these cards in SLI mode for better performance and data will be transferred via the PCI-Express bus.

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Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

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The cooler is a simple heatsink with a fan strapped to it. Thanks to the efficient 40 nm GPU design there is no need for copper or fancy heatpipes.

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Thanks to NVIDIA's power efficient design the GeForce GT 240 no longer requires an extra power connector - while its predecessor 9600 GT required one.

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This is the first time that NVIDIA uses GDDR5 memory chips on their graphics cards. Compared to GDDR3, GDDR5 offers twice the available bandwidth at the same frequency. The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC05. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).

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The uP6210 is a compact, cost-effective voltage regulator that is commonly used on lower end cards. It does not have an I2C interface, so software voltage control is not possible.

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This is NVIDIA's new GT215 GPU, it comes with 727 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan.

Test System

<table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" class="ramtable" width="450">
<tr align="center">
<th colspan="2" scope="row" style="font-size:larger;text-align:center">Test System</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th width="120" scope="row">CPU:</th>
<td scope="row">Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Motherboard:</th>
<td scope="row">Gigabyte X58 Extreme 
Intel X58 & ICH10R</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Memory:</th>
<td scope="row">3x 2048 MB Mushkin Redline XP3-12800 DDR3 
@ 1520 MHz 8-7-7-16</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Harddisk:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Power Supply:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">BFG ES-800 800W</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Software:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">Windows Vista 32-bit SP2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Drivers:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">NVIDIA: 186.18 GT 240: 195.55 ATI: Catalyst 9.6 HD 58xx: 8.66 RC6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Display:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">
LG Flatron W3000H 30" 2560x1600 <img src="http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GT_240_Sonic/images/zotac.jpg" width="120" height="40"></td>
</tr>
</table>

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

BattleForge

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BattleForge, a card based RTS, is developed by the German EA Phenomic Studio. A few months after launch the game was transformed into a Play 4 Free branded game. That move and the fact that it was included as game bundle with a large number of ATI cards made it one of the more well known RTS games of 2009. You as a player assemble your deck before game to select the units that will be available. Your choice can be from forces of Fire, Frost, Nature and Shadow to complement each other.
The BattleForge engine has full support for DX 9, DX 10 and DX 10.1, we used the internal benchmark tool to acquire our results.

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Call of Duty 4

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Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter that is built on the award winning Call of Duty Series. It is the first version to play in modern times. In a near-future conflict between the United States, Europe and Russia you get to play as a United States Marine and a British SAS operative. The engine is Infinity Ward's own creation and has true dynamic lighting, depth of field, dynamic shadows and HDR. Even though the game plot is scripted you will find yourself in intense battles, often working together with computer controlled team mates.

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Call of Juarez 2

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Call of Juarez 2: Bound in Blood is a prequel to the first Call of Juarez game which was one of the first DX10 titles available on the market. This time the plot evolves around two brothers, before each mission you may pick one to play. Your choices affect the game play since both characters have different ways of handling situations and doing combat.
Call of Juarez 2 uses Techland's Chrome Engine 4 which adds Edge Anti Aliasing as one of the first engines on the market. Edge Anti Aliasing looks similar to normal AA but comes with a considerably reduced performance drop. However, due to the deferred shading design of Edge AA, normal AA can't be used on top of it.

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Company Of Heroes

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The real-time strategy game Company of Heroes is set during World War II where you take two American companies through several fights all over France to liberate the country from German occupation. Company of Heroes is the first game to use Relic's next-generation engine "Essence Engine" which includes support for HDR lighting, Shader Model 3.0, normal mapping, dynamic lighting and shadows. You are able to zoom in from the tactical view of the battle field to see the individual units fighting. Often you catch yourself admiring the detailed animations of the soldiers while the fight around you is raging.

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Crysis

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After the tremendous success of Far Cry, the German game studio Crytek released their latest shooter Crysis in 2007. The game was by far the most hyped and anticipated game in 2007, the forums were full of "Can my system run Crysis?" threads because of the high hardware requirements of this game. Just like in Far Cry the plot evolves on a small island with a thick and richly detailed jungle world. A lot of attention has been given to small details like correct physics. For example when you fire on a tree trunk, it will shatter and the tree will fall over leaving a stump behind. Enemies in a car can be stopped by shooting the tire of the car. The game graphics are by far the best ever seen in a PC game so far, yet the game still runs well on most computers.

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II by Relic Entertainment is an RTS game based on the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Unlike other Dawn of War titles there is no base-building element in the game, you simply command units on the battlefield. Due to the non-linear mission design, the choices which mission and objective you pick to pursue have considerable impact on game play and mission difficulty. A "hero" unit concept adds RPG elements to the game, allowing you to advance the unit in terms of levels and abilities. Dawn of War 2 uses the Essence Engine 2.0, version 1.0 was used in the Company of Heroes Series.

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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

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The first-person shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set in the science-fiction universe of Quake and requires several classes to work together to achieve certain goals on a map. In the campaign mode you gain experience which you can use to buy upgrades for your class. The player gets to pick from five classes of either the Global Defense Force or the Strogg faction. As underlying game engine, the successful id Software Doom 3 engine has been licensed, but several features like MegaTextures have been added, giving the outdoor world a much more detailed appearance.

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Far Cry

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Far Cry was released in early 2004 by the new development studio Crytek. It quickly became a massive success because it was one of the first titles to take you in a beautiful 3D outdoor world. Far Cry was one of the most demanding games at its time. Even with today's video cards you can still see big differences in frame rates, especially at the higher resolutions.

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Far Cry 2

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Four years after the success of Far Cry, Ubisoft has published the sequel called Far Cry 2. While the first part was set on an island, Far Cry 2 takes you deep into Africa with game play that resembles Grand Theft Auto much more than the original Far Cry, which was a classical 3D shooter. Ubisoft engineered a completely new 3D engine called "Dunia" which offers a large amount of popular features like DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support, destructible environments, physics and non-scripted AI while not being as much of a resource hog as Crytek's CryEngine.

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FEAR

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The first person shooter F.E.A.R, developed by Monolith Game Studios, was released in Fall 2005 and has a great 3D engine that uses a large number of shading and shadow effects to accurately model the game world. In addition to that it features a realistic physics engine that lets you interact with many objects in the game world. The game was voted game of the year by several publications.

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Tom Clancy's HAWX

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Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. is one of the very few recent flight simulator games on the market. Being a console conversion it emphasizes "flight" more than "simulator". It is set in a near future in which private military companies have begun fighting conflicts for nations with their own military gear. You are playing an elite pilot who was recruited by such a private company. During the game you get to fly over 50 different aircrafts, ranging from the MIG 21 to the mighty F22 Raptor. One notable feature of its engine is the use of GeoEye satellite imagery for terrain generation which offers one of the most realistic incarnations of battlefield terrain available today.

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Prey

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Prey is based on a highly modified 3D engine made by id Software. This first person shooter brought a completely new way of gaming to the genre. In many levels you find yourself walking upside down or on the walls. This adds a completely new aspect to the gaming experience in this genre.

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Quake 4

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The Quake titles are among the most successful first person games. Developed by id Software, the famous game studio that brought you DOOM, you find yourself in a sci-fi world that is full of aliens and shocking effects. The main focus of the game is the single player story line. Quake 4 puts you on the home planet of the Strogg. In a number of missions you and your fellow marines will encounter all sorts of enemies, including some really huge aliens.

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena

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The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a first person shooter game set in a far future. You are Riddick, a notorious space criminal played by Vin Diesel in the movies. Dark Athena continues where Escape from Butcher Bay ended. A major aspect of the game is its tactical use of shadows and stealth so that enemies can't detect you. Vin Diesel's voice acting also adds greatly to the game experience.
The 0.0 FPS scores for NVIDIA cards at 2560x1600 are caused by driver crashes which seem to be related to card with 512 MB memory and below. Since it works fine on ATI this is not a game problem but an NVIDIA driver issue.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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Before its release in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the most hyped games of the last years. This RPG/FPS hybrid game is set a few years in the future, after a nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The release of radiation causes strange things like mutations in the nearby area. You take the role of a Stalker who seeks fame and riches in the contaminated area around Chernobyl. The game engine features all the latest buzzwords like HDR, bullet physics, skeletal animation, soft shadows and weather effects. Stalker's vast outside world is richly modeled, you can interact with a large number of objects in the game thanks to the physics engine.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

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STALKER Clear Sky is GSC Gameworld's prequel to the 2007 hit "STALKER". Just like in the first part the game is set around the Russian area of Chernobyl and Pripyat, most well known for the nuclear accident that occurred there. You play the role of a mercenary who spends his days in The Zone trying to make a living. The Zone is an area which is affected by so-called anomalies which cause mutants to appear and laws of physics to change. While you investigate these anomalies the plot leads up to the events that happened right before the first game starts. A new in-game faction system encourages you to befriend various groups in The Zone in exchange for information or items. While the graphics of Clear Sky are based on the first Stalker game engine, there are numerous improvements, including support for DirectX10 and depth-of-field/volumetric effects.

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Team Fortress 2

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Team Fortress 2 by the famous people from Valve software builds on an improved Half-Life 2 engine to deliver an action packed, team oriented, comic graphics first person shooter game. Even though the game features nice graphics, it tends to be very CPU limited, especially on lower resolutions. Players get to team up being either RED or BLU with a selection of nine classes. Each class offers a different play style, just like in the original Team Fortress games.

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Unreal Tournament 3

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The fourth game in Epic's highly successful Unreal Tournament Series is simply called Unreal Tournament 3. It is based on the all-new Unreal 3 engine which is a major step forward from the previous engine. The game principle is centered about an arena style gameplay where several contestants try to reach a certain kill count or capture a flag for example. As you would expect from a new 2007 title, the graphics are top notch, with large and detailed textures. One major drawback of the way the engine is designed is that there is no support for Anti-Aliasing.

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World In Conflict

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The realtime strategy game World In Conflict by Massive Entertainment is set in 1989 taking the player through a fictional conflict during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike other RTS games, World in Conflict is not centered around building a base, you command units on the battlefield with a number of reinforcement points available to replace lost troops.
Massive's Masstech Game Engine makes heavy use of level-of-detail techniques which allow you to zoom in closely on the action displaying fights in high-fidelity with a large number of effects.

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3DMark03

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Futuremark Corporation is the number one player in the world of synthetic benchmarking. The 3DMark series is the most popular test suite for video card testing and is used by gamers, overclockers and manufacturers alike to determine how fast their hardware is. Even though it is a few years old, 3DMark03 can easily stress today's video cards.

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3DMark05

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Another benchmark from Futuremark is 3DMark05 which comes with four completely new game tests that make massive use of shaders and lighting effects. 3DMark05 is a great test for modern video card architectures - in some tests you are often close to the 30 fps mark, below which your games will feel sluggish.

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3DMark06

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Even though it's based on Futuremark's 3DMark05, the new 3DMark06 adds new tests for Shader Model 3.0 and HDR rendering. It is also the first 3DMark to incorporate a CPU score into the final 3DMark score. All tests have received an overhaul, for example in the Canyon Flight test you can now see beautiful sun glare effects with the help of High Dynamic Range rendering.

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Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

For this test we measure power consumption of only the graphics card, via PCI-Express power connector(s) and PCI-Express bus slot. A Keithley Integra 2700 with 6.5 digits is used for all measurements. Again, the values here reflect card only power consumption measured at DC VGA card inputs, not the whole system.

We chose 3DMark03 Nature as a standard test representing typical 3D usage because it offers: - very high power draw - high repeatability - is a standard benchmark that is supported by all cards - drivers are actively tested and optimized for it - supports all multi-GPU configurations - easy to obtain - fairly compact in size - test runs a constant duration and renders a variable scene with variable complexity just like any normal game.

The four result values are as following:

Idle: Windows Vista Aero sitting at the desktop (1280x1024 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed. Card left to warm up in idle until power draw is stable.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (12 per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. Highest single reading during the test.
Maximum: Furmark Stability Test at 1280x1024, 0xAA. This results in a very high non-game power consumption that can typically be reached only with stress testing applications. Card left running stress test until power draw converged to a stable value.

Previous NVIDIA cards using their new 40 nm graphics processors have already delivered excellent power consumption results. The GeForce GT 240 set the bar even higher. Idle power consumption is at an all-time low for a card in this performance class. Under load the power draw increases, but is still considerably lower than previous-generation products of similar performance. I'd also like to point out that compared to the MSI GT 240, the power consumption under load is higher, probably due to the out-of-the-box overclock and higher voltages which give you better overclocking potential.

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Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

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The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

Palit has implemented a decent fan control mechanism. When the card is idling its fan slows down to be reasonably quiet, yet not as quiet as it (c/sh)ould be in my opinion. Under load the fan noise is very low making this card an enjoyable experience. Other board partners save about 1 USD on their design and completely leave out fan control which results in much noisier cards than the Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic.

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Performance Summary

To create this graph we took all performance results of the five resolutions we tested, threw them together and calculated the relative performance of each card, compared to our review sample. In a sixth graph we also combined all tests in all resolutions to calculate the total relative performance of the review sample.

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Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results.

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Performance per Dollar

If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, then you will love this graph. We looked up the current USD price of each card on the popular online shop Newegg and used it and the relative performance numbers to calculate the Performance per Dollar Index.

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Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

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The overclocks of our card are 670 MHz core (15% overclock) and 2190 MHz Memory (16% overclock). When compared to the NVIDIA reference design clocks, the overclocks are 22% and 29%. Quite some impressive numbers I have to admit, and the overclocking process was really easy. All I did was click "Find Max" three times in GPUTool and everything turned out right. Compared to the MSI GT 240, which required some special tricks, this baby was as easy to OC as it gets. It should be noted however that Palit's card has a higher power draw under load as the card from MSI for example, which is probably caused by higher 3D voltages that help with the overclock.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

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The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 18.3%.

Temperatures

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Temperatures look good, personally I would have liked to see all temperatures shifted by +10°C and got less fan noise in return. Nevertheless, the cooling solution does a nice job, even with 20% overclocking, the temperatures go up by only 2°C.

Value and Conclusion

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According to Palit the expected price of their GeForce GT 240 will be around USD 110.

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Solid overclocking potential
Overclocked out of the box
Low idle power consumption
40 nm GPU
Temperature-controlled fan speeds
Native HDMI output
HDMI audio no longer requires SPDIF cable
No external power connector required
Support for DirectX 10.1
Support for CUDA / PhysX

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High price
Increased power draw in 3D
Can't compete against 9800 GT which is even cheaper
No support for DirectX 11

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<tr><th>8.6</th>
<td>NVIDIA's recent introduction of 40 nm graphics processors is a wise move from the company's standpoint, as it allows the company to take baby-steps on the new silicon fabrication technology. The company started off with two entry-level GPUs in the GeForce 210 and GeForce GT 220, and has gradually upscaled them. This release marks the company's first graphics card to make use of the GDDR5 memory standard, which is twice as fast as GDDR3, clock-for-clock. To begin with, the GeForce GT 240 does come across as noteworthy, perhaps not because of its initial price, which history has shown to have little bearing on a product's performance on the shelves, but that it is able to deliver decent performance levels for the amount of power it consumes, perhaps a fruition of the 40 nm process. 
Palit's overclocked GeForce GT 240 Sonic delivers performance very close to the GeForce 9600 GT, the 50% higher shader core count comes to its rescue in recent games. The GeForce 9600 GT seems to benefit from its higher number of raster operation units. In simple terms, while older games seem to perform well on the 9600 GT, newer, shader-intensive games benefit from the more powerful shader domain of the GeForce GT 240. 
Thanks to the new 40 nm process, the card does not require an additional power connector. It also scores with an extremely low power draw of only 12 Watts in idle. During gaming it needs roughly 60W, which is about 20W more than other GT 240 cards that we reviewed before. It seems to me that Palit gave the GPU voltage a little bump in 3D which considerably helps improving the overclocking potential of this Sonic Edition card. Overclocking was very easy and yielded a healthy overclock, we gained over 15%. Remember, the Sonic Edition is already overclocked, so compared to NVIDIA's reference speeds the total gain was 22% on the core and 29% on the memory. Even with the overclock the fan was reasonably quiet. Palit has done a good job implementing a temperature based fan control mechanism which results in a pleasant work and gaming experience - other board partners save a few bucks and build noisy cards with fixed fan speeds. 
The Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic makes for a decent buy for a cool, low-power, low-noise graphics card that can handle games at medium-thru-low resolutions, if only it had a better price. With GeForce 9800 GT accelerators easily available around the $100 mark, the $110 price-tag simply doesn't cut it. Hopefully, the prices will come down in the near future. 
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