The amount of onboard memory on discrete graphics accelerators keeps getting larger and 1GB has already become a standard today. Does it mean time has come for the next increase? It is no secret that the question about the amount of onboard memory a graphics adapter needs is one of the eternal questions in the consumer 3D graphics industry that keeps surfacing over and over again as the games evolve. As a result, the minimal amount of onboard memory for a relatively high performance graphics accelerator has gradually increased to 512MB. Today the latter number little by little becomes the necessary minimum, while almost all higher-end solutions come with even 1GB of video memory. - X-Bit Labs

Gainward GeForce GTS 250 2GB Card Edition Review

Our today's hero ships in a pretty large box made of thick cardboard. It has very attractive design with dominating blue colours. The verdict about aesthetics of the package design is always subjective and is solely just a matter of your personal preference and taste, but we believe really that a spread angel looks much more attractive than robofrogs on Palit's boxes. However, in our opinion their font used for the GeForce GTS 250 doesn't go well with the other elements of the package design. The box doesn't bear too much information on it. When you see this box on a store shelf, you will only notice the model name and amount of memory.

The graphics adapter we are talking about today uses unconventional but unified PCB layout that we have already seen with Palit boards before. You shouldn't be surprised about it really, because Palit currently owns the Gainward brand. The two graphics cards differ by the stickers on the cooling system casing, although otherwise they are of identical design. This graphics card design uses an shorter PCB than the reference NVIDIA solution, but requires now two power connectors instead of one, which is undoubtedly quite excessive for a solution of this class, especially keeping in mind how little power G92b actually consumes.

The Gainward GeForce GTS 250 2GB version should be regarded as a common GeForce GTS 250 with 1GB using the same criteria. And these graphics cards outperform the Radeon HD 4850 also having 1GB in most benchmarks giving in significantly only for some minor games, where the performance of this class of graphics solutions is too low to have any real practical value. Nevertheless, ATI cards are faster in a number of games, which could also be the case for multiple games that we are not using during our benchmarking sessions. Therefore, the decision should solely be based on the type of games you prefer to play.

Other peculiarities of the Gainward solution we viewed today are pretty minor and do not have any serious effect on the final verdict. Although we would just like to remind you once again that this solution boasts an extremely quiet and efficient cooler. And acoustics is of primary importance to many users out there and may become the primary reason for getting this particular GeForce GTX 250 model.