NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 Roundup (EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI, Sparkle)

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


While the acoustical profile between each of these cards is almost the same, there are some large differences when it comes to actual heatsink efficiency. Gigabyte’s 1GB card leads the pack regardless of its higher clock speeds but the other Gigabyte card gets some disappointing results considering the size of its heatsink. The MSI and Sparkle products provide good performance here as well but the EVGA Superclocked brings up the back of the field due to its low profile heatsink and slow fan.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


Power consumption is about what we would expect but it should be said that the GT 240 is an efficient card when compared to past generations of NVIDIA cards.