Introduction

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Today NVIDIA announces their GeForce GTS 250 Series. While the name my sound like something new and exciting, the GTS 250 is basically an overclocked 9800 GTX based on the G92 GPU. The G92 has been used on a large number of NVIDIA cards before, including the 8800 GS, 8800 GT, 8800 GTS, 9600 GSO, 9600 GT, 9800 GT, 9800 GTX, 9800 GTX+ and 9800 GX2.
Initially NVIDIA offers two reference design cards with 512 MB (like the 9800 GTX) and 1024 MB of video memory. Palit, who is one of NVIDIA's biggest board partners, went all out and offers their own 2048 MB card design on launch day.

<table border="1" class="resulttable" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3">
<tr>
<th></th>
<td>GeForce 
9800 GT</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 4850</td>
<td>GeForce 
9800 GTX</td>
<td>GeForce GTS 
250 1 GB</td>
<td>Palit GTS 
250 2 GB</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 260</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 4870</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 280</td>
<td>Radeon 
HD 4870 X2</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 285</td>
<td>GeForce 
GTX 295</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Shader units </th>
<td align="right">112</td>
<td align="right">800</td>
<td align="right">128</td>
<td align="right">128</td>
<td align="right">128</td>
<td align="right">192</td>
<td align="right">800</td>
<td align="right">240</td>
<td align="right">2x 800</td>
<td align="right">240</td>
<td align="right">2x 240</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>ROPs</th>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">28</td>
<td align="right">16</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">2x 16</td>
<td align="right">32</td>
<td align="right">2x 28</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>GPU</th>
<td align="right">G92</td>
<td align="right">RV770</td>
<td align="right">G92</td>
<td align="right">G92</td>
<td align="right">G92</td>
<td align="right">GT200</td>
<td align="right">RV770</td>
<td align="right">GT200</td>
<td align="right">2x RV770</td>
<td align="right">GT200b</td>
<td align="right">2x GT200b</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Transistors</th>
<td align="right">754M </td>
<td align="right">956M</td>
<td align="right">754M </td>
<td align="right">754M </td>
<td align="right">754M </td>
<td align="right">1400M </td>
<td align="right">956M</td>
<td align="right">1400M </td>
<td align="right">2x 956M</td>
<td align="right">1400M</td>
<td align="right">2x 1400M </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Size</th>
<td align="right">512 MB </td>
<td align="right">512 MB </td>
<td align="right">512 MB</td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">2048 MB</td>
<td align="right">896 MB</td>
<td align="right">512 MB </td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">2x 1024 MB </td>
<td align="right">1024 MB</td>
<td align="right">2x 896 MB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Bus Width </th>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">448 bit </td>
<td align="right">256 bit </td>
<td align="right">512 bit </td>
<td align="right">2x 256 bit </td>
<td align="right">512 bit </td>
<td align="right">2x 448 bit </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Core Clock</th>
<td align="right">600 MHz </td>
<td align="right">625 MHz </td>
<td align="right">675 MHz </td>
<td align="right">738 MHz </td>
<td align="right">745 MHz </td>
<td align="right">576 MHz </td>
<td align="right">750 MHz </td>
<td align="right">602 MHz </td>
<td align="right">750 MHz </td>
<td align="right">648 MHz </td>
<td align="right">576 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Memory Clock</th>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">993 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1100 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1100 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1100 MHz </td>
<td align="right">999 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1107 MHz </td>
<td align="right">900 MHz </td>
<td align="right">1242 MHz </td>
<td align="right">999 MHz </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th>Price</th>
<td align="right">$110</td>
<td align="right">$140</td>
<td align="right">$160</td>
<td align="right">$149</td>
<td align="right">$199</td>
<td align="right">$240</td>
<td align="right">$190</td>
<td align="right">$315</td>
<td align="right">$425</td>
<td align="right">$350</td>
<td align="right">$500</td>
</tr>
</table>

Packaging & Contents

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Palit has chosen to use a yellow box with their famous Palit Frog on it. I find the yellow package background a bit irritating since usually green is the dominating color on the package.

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You will receive:

Graphics card
Documentation + Driver CD
PCI-E Power Cable
SPDIF audio cable
HDMI to DVI Adapter (never seen one of those before!)

The Card

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Unlike most other companies, Palit ships their GTS 250 with a custom designed cooling solution. A metal plate on the back of the card cools the memory chips.

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The card has one analog VGA port, one DVI port and one HDMI port. This is quite an interesting output combination and underlines the potential media PC uses of this card. In case you need a second DVI output, you can use the included HDMI to DVI adapter.
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable (also included). AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users.

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Here are the front and the back of the cards, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

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The first part that comes off the disassembling the card is the top fan assembly. It is a plastic part with a single fan, certainly sufficient to cool this card.

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Next, we remove the heatsink module which is made up of two heatpipes that connect a copper baseplate to the cooling fins.

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The memory chips on the back of the card are cooled by this metal plate.

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Another black metal plate cools the memory chips on the front of the card.

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The card has two six-pin power connectors, both are required for operation of the card. Further to the right on the picture is the white input for the SPDIF audio to be streamed into the HDMI output.

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The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5RS1H23MFR-N2C. With a latency of 0.8 ns, they are specified to run at 1200 MHz.

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Palit uses a voltage regulator from OnSemi on their card. Unfortunately this design does not allow software based voltage control (like on the Volterra regulators).

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Here you can see the good old G92 GPU. It is made in a 55 nm process using 754M transistors. The G92 has been used on a large number of NVIDIA cards before, including the 8800 GS, 8800 GT, 8800 GTS, 9600 GSO, 9600 GT, 9800 GT, 9800 GTX, 9800 GTX+ and 9800 GX2.

Test System

<table border="1" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0" class="ramtable" width="450">
<tr align="center">
<th colspan="2" scope="row" style="font-size:larger;text-align:center">Test System</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<th width="150" scope="row">CPU:</th>
<td scope="row">Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Motherboard:</th>
<td scope="row">Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 Kindly supplied by Gigabyte</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th scope="row">Memory:</th>
<td scope="row">2x 1024MB OCZ DDR3 Platinum @ 1140 MHz 6-6-6-19</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Harddisk:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Power Supply:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">BFG ES-800 800W</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Software:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">Windows Vista SP1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Drivers:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">NVIDIA: ForceWare 181.20, GTS 250: 182.06 ATI: Catalyst 9.1</td>
</tr>
</table>

All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing, No anisotropic filtering. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Call of Duty 4

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Call of Duty 4 is a first-person shooter that is built on the award winning Call of Duty Series. It is the first version to play in modern times. In a near-future conflict between the United States, Europe and Russia you get to play as a United States Marine and a British SAS operative. The engine is Infinity Ward's own creation and has true dynamic lighting, depth of field, dynamic shadows and HDR. Even though the game plot is scripted you will find yourself in intense battles, often working together with computer controlled team mates.

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Call of Juarez

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Call of Juarez was one of the first DX10 titles available on the market, that's why it was heavily used to demonstrate the benefits of DirectX 10. It runs on the Chrome Engine created by the polish game studio Techland. This first-person shooter game is set in a Wild West theme with the plot unfolding from the perspective of two characters: Billy and Reverend Ray. Each offers a different play style to keep the game interesting. Also included in the game is a "Concentration Mode" which slows down time in hectic situations - a feature first pioneered by the Max Payne Series.

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Company Of Heroes

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The real-time strategy game Company of Heroes is set during World War II where you take two American companies through several fights all over France to liberate the country from German occupation. Company of Heroes is the first game to use Relic's next-generation engine "Essence Engine" which includes support for HDR lighting, Shader Model 3.0, normal mapping, dynamic lighting and shadows. You are able to zoom in from the tactical view of the battle field to see the individual units fighting. Often you catch yourself admiring the detailed animations of the soldiers while the fight around you is raging.

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Crysis

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After the tremendous success of Far Cry, the German game studio Crytek released their latest shooter Crysis in 2007. The game was by far the most hyped and anticipated game in 2007, the forums were full of "Can my system run Crysis?" threads because of the high hardware requirements of this game. Just like in Far Cry the plot evolves on a small island with a thick and richly detailed jungle world. A lot of attention has been given to small details like correct physics. For example when you fire on a tree trunk, it will shatter and the tree will fall over leaving a stump behind. Enemies in a car can be stopped by shooting the tire of the car. The game graphics are by far the best ever seen in a PC game so far, yet the game still runs well on most computers.

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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

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The first-person shooter Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is set in the science-fiction universe of Quake and requires several classes to work together to achieve certain goals on a map. In the campaign mode you gain experience which you can use to buy upgrades for your class. The player gets to pick from five classes of either the Global Defense Force or the Strogg faction. As underlying game engine, the successful id Software Doom 3 engine has been licensed, but several features like MegaTextures have been added, giving the outdoor world a much more detailed appearance.

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Far Cry

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Far Cry was released in early 2004 by the new development studio Crytek. It quickly became a massive success because it was one of the first titles to take you in a beautiful 3D outdoor world. Far Cry was one of the most demanding games at its time. Even with today's video cards you can still see big differences in frame rates, especially at the higher resolutions.

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Far Cry 2

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Four years after the success of Far Cry, Ubisoft has published the sequel called Far Cry 2. While the first part was set on an island, Far Cry 2 takes you deep into Africa with game play that resembles Grand Theft Auto much more than the original Far Cry, which was a classical 3D shooter. Ubisoft engineered a completely new 3D engine called "Dunia" which offers a large amount of popular features like DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support, destructible environments, physics and non-scripted AI while not being as much of a resource hog as Crytek's CryEngine.

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FEAR

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The first person shooter F.E.A.R, developed by Monolith Game Studios, was released in Fall 2005 and has a great 3D engine that uses a large number of shading and shadow effects to accurately model the game world. In addition to that it features a realistic physics engine that lets you interact with many objects in the game world. The game was voted game of the year by several publications.

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Left 4 Dead

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Valve's Left 4 Dead is a first person shooter game that offers cooperative elements in both single and multiplayer. You and your team of three buddies end up in a nightmare full of raging zombies - hordes of them. L4D is based on the latest version of Valve's Source Engine which has been used in titles like Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2 before. There are several incremental improvements in the engine like self shadowing, better fog and lighting effects and post-effect shaders that add to the immersion effect.

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Prey

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Prey is based on a highly modified 3D engine made by id Software. This first person shooter brought a completely new way of gaming to the genre. In many levels you find yourself walking upside down or on the walls. This adds a completely new aspect to the gaming experience in this genre.

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Quake 4

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The Quake titles are among the most successful first person games. Developed by id Software, the famous game studio that brought you DOOM, you find yourself in a sci-fi world that is full of aliens and shocking effects. The main focus of the game is the single player story line. Quake 4 puts you on the home planet of the Strogg. In a number of missions you and your fellow marines will encounter all sorts of enemies, including some really huge aliens.

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Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory

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The Splinter Cell Series is endorsed by popular book author Tom Clancy. In the 2005 title Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory you play the NSA agent Sam Fisher who has to use stealth and finesse to make his way through a number of levels mainly set in eastern Asia. The game is based on a modified Unreal 2 engine with support for HDR, normal mapping, parallax mapping and soft shadows. A patch added Shader Model 2.0 support for ATI in addition to the Shader Model 3.0 support which was already part of the original shipping game.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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Before its release in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the most hyped games of the last years. This RPG/FPS hybrid game is set a few years in the future, after a nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The release of radiation causes strange things like mutations in the nearby area. You take the role of a Stalker who seeks fame and riches in the contaminated area around Chernobyl. The game engine features all the latest buzzwords like HDR, bullet physics, skeletal animation, soft shadows and weather effects. Stalker's vast outside world is richly modeled, you can interact with a large number of objects in the game thanks to the physics engine.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear Sky

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STALKER Clear Sky is GSC Gameworld's prequel to the 2007 hit "STALKER". Just like in the first part the game is set around the Russian area of Chernobyl and Pripyat, most well known for the nuclear accident that occurred there. You play the role of a mercenary who spends his days in The Zone trying to make a living. The Zone is an area which is affected by so-called anomalies which cause mutants to appear and laws of physics to change. While you investigate these anomalies the plot leads up to the events that happened right before the first game starts. A new in-game faction system encourages you to befriend various groups in The Zone in exchange for information or items. While the graphics of Clear Sky are based on the first Stalker game engine, there are numerous improvements, including support for DirectX10 and depth-of-field/volumetric effects.

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Team Fortress 2

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Team Fortress 2 by the famous people from Valve software builds on an improved Half-Life 2 engine to deliver an action packed, team oriented, comic graphics first person shooter game. Even though the game features nice graphics, it tends to be very CPU limited, especially on lower resolutions. Players get to team up being either RED or BLU with a selection of nine classes. Each class offers a different play style, just like in the original Team Fortress games.

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Unreal Tournament 3

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The fourth game in Epic's highly successful Unreal Tournament Series is simply called Unreal Tournament 3. It is based on the all-new Unreal 3 engine which is a major step forward from the previous engine. The game principle is centered about an arena style gameplay where several contestants try to reach a certain kill count or capture a flag for example. As you would expect from a new 2007 title, the graphics are top notch, with large and detailed textures. One major drawback of the way the engine is designed is that there is no support for Anti-Aliasing.

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World In Conflict

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The realtime strategy game World In Conflict by Massive Entertainment is set in 1989 taking the player through a fictional conflict during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike other RTS games, World in Conflict is not centered around building a base, you command units on the battlefield with a number of reinforcement points available to replace lost troops.
Massive's Masstech Game Engine makes heavy use of level-of-detail techniques which allow you to zoom in closely on the action displaying fights in high-fidelity with a large number of effects.

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Folding@home

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GPU accelerated computing is the latest trend to speed up computationally intense applications. One of the first projects to implement such a GPGPU method is Folding@home. Participants install a small program on their computer, the "Folding Client", which downloads work units from a server to be processed on the system.
In the past folding has been performed on on the CPU. Recently new clients have been developed for Folding on PlayStation 3, ATI and NVIDIA CUDA.

We used version 6.20r1 to download a work unit and fold it using whatever GPU acceleration is available. Due to the different GPU designs, different types of work unit were used. However, for most Folding users the PPD (Points Per Day) metric is the most important because that's what determines their ranking in the system.

Please note that we will not start multiple client instances. If a manufacturer chooses to implement native support for multiple GPUs, our client will benefit from that however. For comparison: a PlayStation 3 gets about 900 PPD, a Core 2 Duo E8400 about 550 PPD per processor core.

If you want to join the good cause, use team number 50711, which is TechPowerUps own Folding Team.

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3DMark03

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Futuremark Corporation is the number one player in the world of synthetic benchmarking. The 3DMark series is the most popular test suite for video card testing and is used by gamers, overclockers and manufacturers alike to determine how fast their hardware is. Even though it is a few years old, 3DMark03 can easily stress today's video cards.

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3DMark05

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Another benchmark from Futuremark is 3DMark05 which comes with four completely new game tests that make massive use of shaders and lighting effects. 3DMark05 is a great test for modern video card architectures - in some tests you are often close to the 30 fps mark, below which your games will feel sluggish.

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3DMark06

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Even though it's based on Futuremark's 3DMark05, the new 3DMark06 adds new tests for Shader Model 3.0 and HDR rendering. It is also the first 3DMark to incorporate a CPU score into the final 3DMark score. All tests have received an overhaul, for example in the Canyon Flight test you can now see beautiful sun glare effects with the help of High Dynamic Range rendering.

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Power Consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

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<tr align="center">
<th colspan="2" scope="row" style="font-size:larger;text-align:center">Test System</th>
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<tr>
<th width="150" scope="row">CPU:</th>
<td scope="row">Intel Core i7 920 @ 3.8 GHz (Bloomfield, 8192 KB Cache)</td>
</tr>
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<th scope="row">Motherboard:</th>
<td scope="row">Gigabyte X58 Extreme Intel X58 Kindly supplied by Gigabyte</td>
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<th scope="row">Memory:</th>
<td scope="row">2x 1024MB OCZ DDR3 Platinum @ 1140 MHz 6-6-6-19</td>
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<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Harddisk:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Power Supply:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">BFG ES-800 800W</td>
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<tr>
<th valign="top" scope="row">Software:</th>
<td valign="top" scope="row">Windows Vista SP1</td>
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In order to characterize a video card's power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The three result values are as following:

Idle: Windows sitting at the desktop (1024x768 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed.
Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (two per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Highest single reading

Palit's GeForce GTS 250 does not use any form of clock switching, resulting in a higher power consumption in idle than the GTX 2x0 Series. The additional memory modules also place a certain power load on the system, resulting in a fairly high board power draw total.

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Fan Noise

In the past years users would accept everything just to get more performance. Nowadays this has changed with people being more aware of the fan noise and power consumption of their graphic cards.
In order to properly test the fan noise a card emits we are using a Bruel & Kjaer 2236 sound level meter (~$4,000) which has the measurement range and accuracy we are looking for.

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The tested graphics card is installed in a system that is completely passively cooled. That is passive PSU, passive CPU cooler, passive cooling on the motherboard and Solid-State HDD.
This setup allows us to eliminate secondary noise sources and test only the video card. To be more compliant with standards like DIN 45635 (we are not claiming to be fully DIN 45635 certified) the measurement is conducted at 100 cm distance and 160 cm over the floor. The ambient background noise level in the room is well below 20 dbA for all measurements. Please note that the dbA scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. 40 dbA is not twice as loud as 20 dbA. A 3 dbA increase results in double the sound pressure. The human hearing is a bit different and it is generally accepted that a 10 dbA increase doubles the perceived sound level.

For a card in this performance class, the fan of the Palit GTS 250 is just too noisy. The reference design cards are certainly quieter than that. Given the operating temperatures, which are in the low sixties, Palit could have tweaked the fan a bit with more sensible fan settings.

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Performance Summary

To create this graph we took all performance results of the four resolutions we tested, threw them together and calculated the relative performance of each card, compared to our review sample. In a fifth graph we also combined all tests in all resolutions to calculate the total relative performance of the review sample.

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Performance per Watt

This graph was created by taking the relative performance numbers and putting them in contrast to the average power consumption results. To offset power consumption of the rest of the system we subtracted 150 W from the average consumption.

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Performance per Dollar

If you are looking for the best bang for the buck, then you will love this graph. We looked up the current USD price of each card on the popular online shop Newegg and used it and the relative performance numbers to calculate the Performance per Dollar Index.

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Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of ATITool's successor, Furmark and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.

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The final overclocks of our card are 805 MHz core (8% overclock) and 1160 MHz Memory (5% overclock).

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.

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The actual 3D performance gained is 6.3%.

Temperatures

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The GPU temperatures are fairly low, my choice would have been higher temperatures for less fan noise.

Value and Conclusion

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A final price for the Palit GTS 250 2 GB isn't set yet but expect it to be in the $199 range.

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2 GB of memory
Native HDMI
Support for CUDA / PhysX
Red PCB

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Noisy fan
No real product innovation
High power draw

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<tr><th>7.5</th>
<td>In our recent poll "Is NVIDIA's rebranding strategy helpful?" we saw 48% of people reply that they want to see innovation when a new product is released. While NVIDIA claims there is some innovation in making a 1 GB version I disagree. At least Palit did something to top that and came up with a 2 GB version of the card. Unfortunately there is very little to no gain from going 2 GB. Even if we assume that there are some gains at 2560x1600 with lots of AA, the card's limited shading power will slow down any such games to unplayable framerates (~15 FPS). Also the power consumption is higher which may turn some green users away. While I don't have any numbers, I could imagine that 2 GB are able to make a difference in specialized scientific CUDA applications that need to process large data sets. 
Palit's cooling solution can keep the card relatively cool, but does so with a fairly large amount of noise, which is too much for an upper midrange card. I suggested to Palit that they look at some possible fan setting optimizations, so maybe this can be fixed in the near future. 
Overall my opinion is that the GeForce GTS 250 is mainly a renaming of an existing product to more properly reflect NVIDIA's naming scheme. While the 1 GB GTS 250 is priced quite competitively I would just spend a bit more and get a HD 4870. Palit's 2 GB card is certainly a very interesting experiment but probably too early. Most titles don't even use 1 GB of video memory.
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