GeForce GT 240 review

NVIDIA going budget with the GeForce GT 240

NVIDIA today adds a new GeForce graphics card to their product lineup. The product is nothing new in terms of features and performance in your end, but on the chipset side however, this is a completely new silicon made at the new 40nm manufacturing node at TSMC.

Yes guys and girls, today the GeForce GT 240 sees the light. In several ways an interesting product as it does offer decent value for money. GT 240 is aimed somewhere in-between the GT 220 and as NVIDIA states, GeForce 9800 GT in terms of performance and feature set. Price wise we are looking at a fairly low sub-100 USD product series -- which will likely drop to say 80 USD fairly quick in the weeks to come..

GeForce GT240 is designed for a the lower segment of the mainstream market and comes with support for DX10.1
Yes unfortunately for NVIDIA they still do not offer DX11 products in any shape or form, which is somewhat of a miss anno Q4 2009. GeForce GT240 comes packed with 96 shader cores and features GDDR3 memory, however if you throw in an extra tenner -- you can get a 128-bit gDDR5 memory version as well -- giving the card some more breathing space in terms of memory bandwidth and in the end overall performance.

Built on the GT215 core, the GeForce GT 240 graphics card thus is based on a 40nm GPU, manufactured at TSMC, will boast support for DirectX 10.1 and will be featured with 96 Stream processors.

Word on the street is that these puppies overclock like a friggin lunatic -- so we'll have to check that out. We picked up the GeForce GT 240 from MSI which comes packed with a nice design and some really good connectivity -- let's have a look shall we.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 Series review

Oh good gosh people, that certainly took a while didn't it? But yes, today finally is the day we can bring you an in depth review of AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 products. Two products armed with loads of features to attack the budget and mid-range market with prices that are really interesting.

AMD has now launched no less than five desktop graphics cards, in the high-end range you'll see the 80nm fabrication process Radeon HD 2900 XT, a product that is still discussed a lot for sure. But there are four other products as well. ATI is also launching an all new Radeon 2400 and 2600 series (low- and mid-range). These products will be based on the newer 65nm fabrication production process.

Let's have a brief overview of the five new graphics cards and on the next page we'll go a little deeper into the silicon that is Radeon HD 2000.

• Radeon HD 2900 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 Pro
• Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Radeon HD 2400 Pro

Obviously for all products, we are talking about the next-gen product series here and that means 100% DirectX 10 compatible products, so you'll understand that we'll also talk a little about DX10, the Unified Shader Architecture with those lovely stream processors; a new function on the 2000 Series called Tessellation and last but not least, Avivo HD.

So what we'll do today is go deep into the technology that is the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600. We'll have an overview of the product line-up, the features, do a good number of gaming performance tests and, after the 2900 XT UVD debacle, we'll test Avivo HD with a self-developed performance test with the help of a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD title.

In total we'll test three cards today, the Radeon HD 2400 XT 256MB (ATI reference), the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR3 256MB (PowerColor) and the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 (ATI reference).