Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic 1 GB

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.

Palit GeForce GT 240 Sonic 1 GB