The NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 (DDR5) Overclocking Guide

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 240 is one of the first slew of NVIDIA GPUs to be fabricated using the 40 nm process technology. It is also one of the first NVIDIA GPUs to support DirectX 10.1, which NVIDIA eschewed earlier as a pointless feature.

In the past, NVIDIA would have added these minor improvements to their mid- to high-end offerings, but this time, they chose to try the 40 nm process technology and DirectX 10.1 in their latest low-end GPUs. The trio of GeForce GT 240, GeForce GT 220 and the GeForce 210 are all aimed at the value end of the market.

The GeForce GT 240 is a derivative of the GT200 GPU that powers the GeForce GTX 280 and the GeForce GTX 260. It is a slimmed-down version that features 96 stream processors and 8 ROPs. At the official core speed of 550 MHz, it is capable of processing up to 17.6 billion texels and 4.4 billion pixels per second. For more information on the NVIDIA GT200 GPU, please take a look at the NVIDIA GTX 280 & GTX 260 Technology Report.

Our review of the Galaxy GeForce GT 240 (DDR5) showed that it was as fast as the GeForce 9600 GT (96 W). This makes it a superior solution as it is cheaper and has a lower power consumption and thermal output. It also supports DirectX 10.1 (as little of a difference that makes), DirectCompute 1.2 (instead of DirectCompute 1.1 in the GeForce 9600 GT) and a newer version of the PureVideo HD video processor. Finally, it comes with a HD audio processor built-in, so it supports 8-channel LPCM right out of the box.

As it runs with such a low thermal output, it would be a sin not to exploit that and try overclocking it to the max. Of course, its overclockability would be limited by the fact that it is only powered by the PCI Express bus, limiting it to just 75 W of power. There's no way to know for sure without testing, and that's what we are going to do today.

NVIDIA conveniently provides us with all the necessary tools for easy overclocking, with complete access to the core, shader and memory clock speeds. They even allow you to control the fan speed. All you have to do is install the overclocking tool and see how far it can go!

Like in our previous overclocking guides, we do not want this to be an example of extreme overclocking, where you would need to resort to third-party coolers. With that method, you can achieve an incredible degree of overclocking but it would come at a significant cost. We wanted this attempt to come at "no cost" to the user. That meant overclocking the GeForce GT 240 using its standard cooler.

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