Today NVIDIA announces their GeForce GTS 250 series. While the name my sound like something new and exciting, the GeForce GTS 250 is basically an overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX based on the G92 chipset. The G92 has been used on a large number of NVIDIA cards before, including several GeForce 8800 series, as well as the GeForce 9800 series. Initially NVIDIA offers two reference design cards with 512MB and 1024MB of video memory. But Palit, who is one of NVIDIA's biggest board partners, went all out and offers their own 2048MB card design on launch day. That is what we call a beefy board with a lot of frame buffer that can come in handy in current and future games. - techPowerUp

Palit GeForce GTS 250 2GB Graphics Version Review

Palit has chosen to use a yellow box with their famous Palit Frog on it. We find the yellow package background just a bit irritating since usually green is the dominating color on the package. Unlike most other companies, Palit ships their GeForce GTS 250 with a custom designed cooling solution. And a metal plate on the back of the card cools the memory chips. 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 to the cooling fins.

The final price for the Palit GeForce GTS 250 2GB isn't set yet but expect it to be in the $199 range. Wehn you ask to users if the rebranding strategy is helpful we saw that people reply that they want to see innovation when a new product is released. While NVIDIA claims there is some innovation in making a 1GB version we disagree. At least Palit did something to top that and came up with a 2GB version of the card. Unfortunately there is very little to no gain from going 2GB. Even if we assume that there are some gains at the highest resolutions with lots of anti-aliasing, the card's limited shading power will slow down any such games.

Also the power consumption is higher which may turn some green users away. While we don't have any numbers, we could imagine that 2GB 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 board relatively cool, but does so with a fairly large amount of noise really, which is too much for an upper mid-range video card. We suggested to Palit that they look at some possible fan setting optimizations, so maybe this can be fixed in the near future. If that can be done it would be a really great improvement for their special cooling solution.

Though overall our 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 GeForce GTS 250 1GB is priced quite competitively we would just spend a bit more and get a Radeon HD 4870. Palit's 2GB card is certainly a very interesting experiment but probably too early. And that just because most titles don't even use 1GB of video memory.