BFG Tech GeForce GTS 250 Graphics Card Review

The GeForce 9800 GTX+ Gets Updated

This morning at the CeBIT tradeshow, NVIDIA announced the new GeForce GTS 250 1GB graphics card. As many of you know, the GeForce GTS 250 1GB is an update to the highly popular GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics card. What many thought was just a re-launch of the GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics card isn’t quite the full story. The GeForce GTX 9800 GTX+ was launched on June 19th 2008 in order to play the act of the spoiler to the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. The card has done well over the past nine months, but it has had several tweaks done on it and was given a new name. The new GeForce GTS 250 will hit retail shelves on March 10th, 2009 and will be available in 512MB and 1GB models at $129 and $149, respectively. Let’s take a look at the changes made to the GeForce GTX 9800 GTX+ to understand why the name was changed.

For starters, the MSRP on the 512MB frame buffer version of the GeForce GTS 250 is now just $129, which is lower than the $169 MSRP on the GeForce 9800 GTX+. That being said, the PNY GeForce 9800 GTX+ can be picked up for $124.99 after rebate today, so it will be interesting to see how soon the rebates come out for the GeForce GTS 250. With the stock market hitting a twelve year low consumers have to be value conscious, and since the GeForce GTS 250 supporting PhysX, SLI, GeForce 3D Vision, and CUDA it should get some attention at this price point. The 1GB version of the of the card should be of interest to those that play games at larger resolutions as the extra frame buffer is where the performance boost will come from.

Product highlights include:

• Highest performing GPU at the $149 price point, especially for new games
• NVIDIA PhysX technology for the most interactive and realistic gaming experience
• NVIDIA SLI technology for day of launch multi-GPU scaling
• NVIDIA CUDA for GPU-accelerated desktop applications
• Support for NVIDIA 3D Vision for immersive stereo gaming
• Ready for Windows 7

Hardware product differentiators between the new GeForce GTS 250 board and original GeForce 9800 GTX+ board include:

• 1GB framebuffer vs. 512MB framebuffer max config
• PCB design efficiency improvements (9-inches vs. 10.5-inches)
• Power efficiency improvements (single 6-pin connectors vs. dual 6-pin connector)

When it comes to clock speeds the GeForce GTS 250 has clock speeds that remain the same as the 9800 GTX+. The GPU core clock is 738MHz, 1836MHz for the shaders, and 1100MHz (or 2200 MT/s) for the GDDR3 memory. That being said, let’s take a look at the card and jump into the performance numbers.