We know about the GeForce GTS 250, where it is nothing more than a rebranded GeForce 9800 GTX+ version. And while this is annoying to a degree for the less experienced users who tend not to keep up with what's happening, but if you are looking for something that is to be a well known contender, then this GeForce GTS 250 could well be a good choice. Since the card is a GeForce 9800 GTX+ and it's been out for so long now, so companies have been able to offer a good range of options from the word go. Today we will have just a look at what exactly Gigabyte has done to the card and if it can stand out from the competition. We will have a closer look at the graphics card itself in just a moment. - TweakTown

Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB Version Card Review

Gigabyte has actually taken the time to revamp the package with a new darker black design which looks great. We can see that most of the box is taken up with a picture of a robot. And across the top of the box we have the brand while across the bottom we have the model along with mention of how much memory comes on the card, in this case 1GB. To the right of the box we have a couple of stickers, the GeForce GTS 250 is part of the new UDV range of graphics cards which carries 2oz of copper in the PCB along with a number of other features that increase the quality of the card, with benefits like overclock capability.

Pulling the card out of the box, we see the Zalman cooler really stands out. The particular model we're seeing isn't one we've seen on a graphics card before and it looks pretty impressive with a number of heat pipes coming out of the bottom. If you look carefully you can see the copper base of the cooler, this helps get the hot air off the GPU and move it through the heatpipes and away from the card. Moving around, we can see a single PCI Express connector at the back of the card. While generally speaking this isn't all that interesting, though this is only half of what generally these video cards require as power.

And closer to the front of the board we see a single SLI connector which is again interesting since we saw Palit and Galaxy include two of these. What this means is that you can only run two of these boards together, but this isn't really a bad thing as running some GeForce GTS 250's in 3-way SLI is pretty pointless and your money would be better off spent on a single high-end card. As far as clock rates go, the Gigabyte graphics version seems to just carry default GPU and shader clocks, these being 738MHz and 1836MHz speed respectively. As for the 1GB of GDDR3 memory, it carries with it a 2200MHz effective clock.

Now up until our last few tests there wasn't anything too exciting about this card. Sure, the card performed like we thought it would in the numbers game, but upon looking at the temperature of the card along with the power usage, it was simply amazing to see just how well the card performed compared to the others. It's good to see that Gigabyte is using the technology that's been implemented into their award winning motherboards. While at first we thought this was going to be more gimmicky than anything else, once we really got down to the testing side of things we can see that there's some real advantages to the UDV technology.

So at $155 from Newegg, the Gigabyte version of the GeForce GTS 250 is one of the more expensive ones available. For around $20 less you could get something that's clocked higher and is going to perform faster overall, but honestly what we see here from Gigabyte makes this an excellent buy. While the package might be a bit on the light side, with good connectivity, excellent cooling and just an excellent set of features packed onto this version of the GeForce GTS 250, we highly recommend it to anyone looking at a graphics card under $150 who is able to play most games at resolutions of up to mid-range widescreen.