ASUS ENGT240 512MB GDDR5 Video Card

introduction

With the introduction of the GT220s a few weeks ago, the GT220 was a great video card for HTPCs and other systems that were able to play all the new video games on lower settings. But, for some the GT220 might not just cut it due to their higher gaming settings and other reasons. This is why nVidia came out with the new GT240 line-up of video cards to filfill the needs of those that don't need extreme settings in video games but want to get decent amount of performance on higher settings. ASUS sent us their ENGT240 512MB GDDR5 video card to test out on our testbench.

The ASUS ENGT240 512MB GDDR5 video card runs in a very affordable price at $99 on Newegg. In our opinion it is a great card for mainstream gaming PCs. The ENGT240 is a very quiet, small, and power efficient mainstream card that won't be a dissapointment to HTPC users and mild gamers. This video card also comes very handy for those looking forward for some PhysX action. You might have a powerful card that renders your games but by having one of these little beast in your system as a dedicated PhysX card, it could bring up your framerates tremendously.

There are two editions of this ASUS ENGT240 video card. One of them is the 512MB GDDR5 model which you are reading about right now and the other is a 1024MB DDR3 model which we are going to also review in the next few days. Both of these edition come with the new Xtreme Design that ASUS has implemented on their cards. These Xtreme Design cards come with Performance, Safety and Reliability. For Performance ASUS has included SmartDoctor, a utility that we will go into more depth on the following pages, and GamerOSD, a real-time in-game overlcocking tool. Next up the Safety features implemented on the card are fuse protections which deliver double the over-current protection for risk-free computing, and EMI shild that blocks radiations to protect user's health and improve 66% graphics clarity. and finally the Reliability brings double reinforment and crack prevention for the GPU, and dust-proof fan that helps extend lifespan by 25%. Now with all this said, let's take a look how this card will keep up with a few other cards similar to the GT240 on our Core i7 system.