AXLE GeForce GT 240 Video Card Review

The AXLE GeForce GT 240 initially isn’t a card to write home about, as it is identical to the NVIDIA reference design as stated before, so let’s fire up MSI’s Afterburner GPU tweaking utility.

As you can see above, the highest stable clocks I could achieve were 649 MHz / 1880 MHz / 1581 MHz which were improvements of:

• 18% overclock on the GPU
• 11% overclock on the Memory
• 18% overclock on the Shaders

Now let’s see how these new clocks perform compared to the reference clocks and the other cards:

In Furmark v1.7.0, the AXLE GeForce GT 240 received roughly 16% better performance over its stock clocks, which is a decent gain, as it puts it right under the GeForce 9600 GSO. This leads me to believe the shaders are important in this test, as the Core and Memory (as well as bandwidth) clocks are greater on the overclocked GT 240, but the Shaders are much higher on the 9600 GSO.

In 3DMark Vantage, the overall score improves by 15% and the GPU score again yields a 16% gain. This is a very good result considering the AXLE GeForce GT 240 becomes significantly better than each card in this synthetic benchmark. Let’s see the gains in a real-world DirectX 9 level game:

In CMR DiRT 2, the overclock gives the AXLE GeForce GT 240 a very substantial 40% gain, which turns it from worst performer to best. This is a very good result, and it also means that at the same clocks, the newer GT215 core indeed outperforms the good ol’ G92 core. I just wish NVIDIA would bump the shader clocks a bit to make a direct upgrade.