Nvidia's GT 240 has gone on sale today, and judging by some early listings, the new 40nm DirectX 10.1 card is no bargain.

All currently available models are reference clocked, 550MHz core, 900MHz memory and 96 shaders at 1340MHz. The cheapest versions, with 512MB of GDDR3, are listed at as low as €75, while the priciest SKUs with 1GB of GDDR5 cost around €100. Bear in mind that these are launch prices limited to just a handful of retailers. We expect them to drop slightly as the cards become widely available.

This sounds like quite a lot for a card Nvidia itself is comparing to ATI's HD 4670 in benchmarks. However, if the GT 215-based Nvidia manages to perform on par with ATI's similarly priced 40nm HD 4770, it could be a good choice for undemanding consumers who still don't plan to migrate to Win 7 and DirectX 11.

Hopefully we will see some performance numbers soon, so stay tuned.