Now last week NVIDIA released their GeForce GTS 250 series. As most of you already know the cards are based on the existing G92 chipset which has been used on a wide range of GeForce 8800 and also GeForce 9800 cards before. The only novelty, if you can call it that, is that there is a 1GB version available now. We also checked already the 2GB exclusive Palit card and saw that there is no need for such a board yet. Galaxy has chosen to use an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo cooler instead of the reference GeForce GTS 250 cooler which should hopefully make for a quieter experience. What is even better is that according to Galaxy the price of the video card will not be higher than $149. - techPowerUp

Galaxy GeForce GTS 250 1GB Graphics Card Review

Galaxy's package looks a bit dull in my opinion. With a few more color highlights would have been nice to draw more attention of possible customers. Some big blinking text about the Arctic Cooling cooler would also be useful to separate the product from the loads of reference designs on the market. The Twin Turbo cooler covers the whole front of the card with its two fans. Due to the cooler design the card will need three slots when installed in your system. The card has one one DVI port and one HDMI port. This is quite an interesting output combination and underlines the potential media PC uses of this particular graphics card.

This little jumper controls the dual BIOS feature of the Galaxy GeForce GTS 250. In fact Galaxy has put two independent BIOS chips on their card, so you can recover the card easily in case a BIOS flash goes wrong. It is safe to switch the jumper while the system is running, but the BIOS will only be reloaded on a system restart. The board has two 6-pin power connectors, both are required for operation of the card. We could overclock the video card up to 778MHz core with 2450MHz effective memory speed. The overclocks listed were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings, but every single sample overclocks differently.

According to Galaxy their GeForce GTS 250 edition will retail around $149. While NVIDIA claims there is some innovation in making a 1GB version we disagree. In our article of Palit's 2GB board we saw that increasing the memory even further can't improve the product. Galaxy's optimization is using a quiet Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo and it seems to be a good choice. The card is very quiet in both idle and load, making it one of the quietest cards in that performance class. Now while 1GB of memory has only a slight performance increasing effect, the reduced fan noise can make a difference and a great added value.

Since Galaxy is offering their board at the price of other reference design cards, this is a no brainer. At this price point the video card is an excellent deal price to performance wise. However, if you can find a GeForce 9 series version for a good price you should also just consider it, since the GeForce GTS 250 doesn't bring anything really new to the table.