Review: A rebrand is born
Nvidia is a company well known for its rebranding, and its latest product is definitely nothing new to this tradition. Since June time, when the company released the GT200 series of really new chips, they only had some optical shrink products in 55nm, and no truly new GPUs.
Geforce GTS 250 is based on the G92b chip, the 55nm successor of the 65nm G92 chip. The 55nm G92b was launched as Geforce 9800 GTX+ and Nvidia now claims that this new card is an upgrade to this good old card. The Geforce 9800 GTX+ was launched in June and it was selling for $229 for 512MB card and Nvidia dreams that the „new“ Geforce GTS 250 with almost the same clocks and specs with 1GB will be selling for $149 plus tax, and $129 plus tax for the 512MB version. We don't believe that this is possible at this time, but eventually you should be able to buy these cards at this price.
The first thing that you should know about the Geforce GTS 250 is that this is a cost-down version of 9800 GTX+ card. The card's PCB is smaller (9 inch long compared to 10.5 inch), and we were informed that this card is about $15 cheaper to produce than the 9800GTX+.
The card is clocked at 738MHz core, 1836 MHz shaders and 2200 MHz for the 256-bit GDDR3 memory. The overclocked EVGA Geforce GTS 250 SC (Superclocked) is clocked at 774MHz core, 1890MHz for shaders and 2246Mhz memory.
The card looks almost the same, although it has better thermal characteristics, and we were informed that some of the cost down 9800 GTX+ that were selling in October were almost identical to what Nvidia now calls Geforce GTS 250.
Geforce GTS 250 is based on the G92b chip, the 55nm successor of the 65nm G92 chip.
The “new” GTS 250 has a single six-pin PCIe power connector, while the 9800GTX+ normally has two.
One PCI-Express 6-pin power connector on GTS 250 card.
The maximum TDP is rated at 150W, and as the card has 75W from the PCIe slot, and gets 75W from a six pin PCie connector, it should have enough power.
As you can see, the card is two slots wide and the cooler is quiet. Nvidia is betting that 1024MB memory should help you in AA and in very high resolutions.
Combining GTS 250 and 9800 GTX+ cards in SLI we can get better performance. It is supposed to work, but we did not have time to check this out (bear in mind that you can't mix a 512MB and a 1024MB card).
Nvidia has some nice features implemented in its recent Geforce cards, such as PhysicX and CUDA. One of the latest toys you can play with usin Geforce GTS 250 is Arcsoft's Total Media Theatre which uses CUDA technology to deliver excellent high-definition video on your PC. This is a DirectX 10 card with PCIE 2.0 support.