The Gainward GT240 support's Nvidia's CUDA technology, which can accelerate various tasks under an appropriate software environment. For example, CUDA could offload the CPU of a system during video playback or encoding. Here we used the CyberLink PowerDVD 9 software, which is compatible with CUDA.

As you can see below, enabling the hardware acceleration significantly drops the utilization of the CPU:

The CPU usage dropped down to 1%, meaning that all the rendering load passed to the GPU leaving our CPU free to deal with other tasks. Low-powered systems (i.e. Intel Atom) would be highly benefited from such a help. CUDA could also help a lot with applications such as Adobe's Photoshop, TMPGEnc etc...

- Overclocking

Let's now see the overclocking limit of the 40nm Gainward GT240. Since Rivatuner didn't support the card out-of-the-box, we used Nvidia's own OC tuner.

The Gainward GT 240 operated with great stability with 674MHz/1995MHz/1701MHz for core, memory and shaders, respectively.

It is also possible to get an even higher performance if you set the card's fan speed to 100%. We got a somewhat better result here but not high enough to justify the emitted noise: