Legit Reviews

Today we are looking at PNY's newest video card, based on the GT215 core, their VERTO GeForce GT 240. It is basically an NVIDIA reference design from the heatsink to the specifications (standard all around), but we shall see how it does against a similar reference card as well as other cards in its class.

Looking at the back of the card, aside from the nice bright blue PCB, there is not a whole lot to look at. There are just the four nice low profile heatsink retention screws and a few stickers for inspection passes and part numbers.

From this angle you can see that the heat sink/fan overhangs the PCB by about 3/8" bringing the total card length to 7 1/4". Also noticeable is the heatsink design: an aluminum block on the bottom that is about an eighth of an inch all around except for the fins shown from the opposite angle and with a very thin aluminum topper above the plastic shroud sandwiched in between. You can also see a thick sticker on top which I have a better shot of below:

As you can see here, the sticker does not lay perfectly flat on the top piece of aluminum, as the heatsink is screwed together from the top only, instead of the bottom or a combination of both, and the screw heads are not recessed into the aluminum enough. Simply a visual annoyance is all.

For connectors, the PNY VERTO GeForce GT 240 offers the standard budget variety, one DVI, one VGA, and one HDMI out. PNY advertises that the HDMI connector can output full 7.1 surround sound; I have no way to test that actual functionality aside from knowing it outputs sound well, so we'll just leave it at that.

This card has most components to the left of the CPU due to the single slot cooler lying very close to the PCB. It has a few components on each side of the end of it because the heatsink is rounded at the end.

The 40nm GT215 core Rev A2 produces an estimated 386 GFLOPs, which is actually slightly less than the 9600 GSO which is at 396 GFLOPs, but we will look at the difference in performance later; let's look at some paper reference specifications:

Looking at the specifications of its opponents, the PNY GT 240 has quite a challenge ahead of it, so let's take a look at the retail box and bundle and get on with the testing results.