Introduction

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. Axle has designed their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution on their Axle GeForce GT 240 Sonic. In addition to that the card uses 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. The clock speeds are unchanged from NVIDIA's reference design with 550 / 1700 MHz.

Packaging

Axle's packaging shows all the important product highlights on the front while the back goes into more detail about what you can do with their GeForce GT 240.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide

The Card

Axle has chosen to design their own PCB and uses a custom cooling solution made by Arctic Cooling.


Axle has designed the card to occupy two slots in the system. Even with the heatsink there is still some space left to suck in fresh air even in a full case.


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.


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.


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.