ECS Geforce GT 240 Review

RHKCommander959 - February 9, 2010
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Testing:

Testing procedure for the ECS GT 240 512 MB NGT240-512QI-F graphics card is the same as with all of the other cards here at OCC. The card will be stressed and performance recorded during testing. For low end cards the settings are dialed down to allow them to still produce playable frames, this is the case for the GT 240. The games consist of Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead, Darkest of Days, Call of Duty: World at War, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 5, and Left 4 Dead, and the synthetic benchmarks are 3DMark 06 and 3DMark Vantage. After running the card normally through the testing phase, the video card will then be overclocked and tested again. The results of the overclocked and stock speed performance can then be compared to see how large of a gain is made (if any). All the system settings remain the same from card to card and test to test, with the exception of disabling PhysX, where applicable.

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Platinum
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card: ECS GT 240 NGT240-512QI-F
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Western Digital Green 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition 64-bit SP1
Case: Hiper Osiris

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

ECS GT 240 650/1700/1700

The memory on the ECS GT 240 was not very overclockable and would become unstable or result in freezing/crashes with a slight bump so I left it at stock. 1750MHz felt possible but as I said, it froze during testing, even a slight bump caused it; the memory on this specific card might be a low bin. I had to play with drivers to find one that would allow overclocking; MSI Afterburner was the only software that would let me in the end. Unlinking the Core/Shader allowed a higher Shader overclock of 1700MHz (27% gain), and 650MHz core (18% gain). The card loaded at 46C maximum and idled at 26C overclocked with fan at 100%, while ambient was 21C. At 100% the fan was barely audible over the CPU and case fans. Not bad at all, minus memory overclocking.