Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB Review

Overclocking

With the Gigabyte’s impressive amount of extra cooling headroom we were hopeful of some excellent overclocking results and set about tweaking the card’s core and memory clocks. After an hour or so tweaking and testing we finally settled on a core clock of 775MHz, up from 738MHz, and a shader clock of 1,928MHz, up from 1,836MHz, an increase of just five percent. We also upped the card’s un-cooled memory from 1.1GHz (2.2GHz effective) to 1.15GHz (2.3GHz effective), again an increase of roughly five percent.

Perhaps we’ve just been spoiled recently by the ATI Radeon HD 4890's awesome amount of overclocking headroom, but a five percent overclock is a little disappointing, especially considering the significantly upgraded cooling on offer. Still, it is free performance, and adds an extra frame per second or so to the both the minimum and average frame rates, upping performance at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA from 23.9fps to 25.1fps.

Value and Final Thoughts

We’re always a little sceptical when it comes to graphics cards sporting extra memory above that of the stock model as it’s a common tactic by board partners to lure unknowledgeable consumers into buying inferior hardware. Happily though that’s not the case here, with the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB offering some very notable improvements in frame rates in a number of games.

Memory hungry titles such as Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 benefit most, especially at higher resolutions and anti-aliasing levels where the extra 512MB of GDDR allows huge improvements. However, these gains are by no means universal, with performance in Call of Duty: World at War the same regardless of the amount of memory sported by a GTS 250.


The custom Zalman VF1050 cooler is both a blessing and a curse. Despite delivering brilliant thermal performance at both load and idle (a full 38°C cooler than the stock GTS 250 cooler under the ultra heavy synthetic load of Furmark), the card’s lack of a PWM interface means that the 70mm cooling fan is annoyingly loud when idle. While admittedly quieter than the stock card at load, we’d imagine you’ll spend the majority of time at your PC not thrashing your GPU (unless you’re into Folding@home of course), and the fan’s single speed is a real shame.

While the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB does offer a genuine performance advantage over competing GTS 250s as well as superior cooling, its biggest problem lies in the guise of ATI’s increasingly aggressive pricing strategy. You can now pick up an ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB, a card that resoundingly thrashes the GTS 250 1GB in every single test bar Folding@home for just £10 more, an almost irresistible deal considering the HD 4870 1GB offers hugely superior performance to the GTS 250 - more than the 10 per cent price increase, that's for sure.

Add this almost unfairly tough competition to the Gigabyte’s unfortunately noisy cooler and you have a card that, while undoubtedly superior to other GTS 250 and all of ATI’s “affordable” range of cards like the HD 4850 or HD 4770, loses a fair amount of its appeal. While it’s by no means a bad card, for not a lot more money you can get a great deal more graphics card elsewhere.

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Score Guide