Introduction

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.

Packaging & Contents

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.



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

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.


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.



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

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.


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


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


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


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.


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.


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).


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.