The infamous GTS250 card finally hits the Atomic Labs...
We've been wondering if we were ever going to get one of these cards, especially with the whole blacklisting thing going on right now - thankfully our contacts at GIGABYTE managed to get us one in record time.
The card we got is the GTS250, which as much as NVIDIA would like you to think that it's running a GT200 core, it's actually just running the G92b that has seen use in the 8800GT/GTS, 9800GT/X/+ and so on.
It's running at a core speed of 740MHz, a shader speed of 1850MHz and a memory speed of 2100MHz, with 1GB of GDDR3 on a 256-bit bus for plenty of bandwidth.
Because it does have 1GB of memory means that this is the redesigned PCB - the 512MB version is identical in length to the 9800GTX+. It's a huge improvement in size as well, shaving off an inch or two and bringing it closer to the 9600GT territory.
GIGABYTE have chosen to use a Zalman VF1050 cooler with it too, which they claim give it up to 30% overclocking capability and 5-10% drop in temperature. We're not quite sold on it doing that, but it does look very nice and should prove better than the stock heatsink.
Head over to the gallery to see pics of the card (as well as comparitive pics) and check out the full results in an upcoming Issue of Atomic!
Issue: 109 | February, 2010