Evolution is the nature of nature. Everything evolves. Man continues to work to make everything that he has better. Every product gets replaced by a more efficient and more feature-rich product. Such is the nature of things. Naturally, this applies to the world of technology where this evolution is very fast. Almost every year a technological product gets replaced by a newer, faster model. The graphics card industry is no stranger to this evolution. And the two big players here, Nvidia and ATI, are always looking to outdo each other with faster and faster graphic cards. As they say, “competition drives innovation”.

The GTS 250 is a perfect example of evolution. The G92 GPU chip used in this card, has a long history. Such is the history of this chip, that it would not be wrong to give this chip a legendary status and just call it “The G92”. This chip may be forever remembered in video card history for showing the world that a “mainstream video card” need not be a slouch capable of playing the games only at lower resolutions and lower settings when compared to their $600 top of the line brethren. For more on the G92 history check this out. The G92 based on 65nm fabrication process made its first appearance in the 8800 GT, with a handicap. The handicap was that the G92 chip implemented in the 8800 GT had only 112 shaders enabled. The G92 would make its full featured appearance in a video card called the 8800 GTS. The name was old, same as the G80 GPU chip based 8800 GTS,  but the underlying structure was different. G92-based 8800 GTS has 128 Shader Processors; uses a 256-bit wide memory interface paired with 512 MB, 1GB or 2 GB video memory. The G80-based 8800 GTS had 96 Shader Processors and used a 320-bit wide memory interface paired with usually 320 MB or 640 MB video memory.

The G92 chip would show up again in a video card named the 9800 GTX.  The 9800 GTX was basically the same card as the G92-based 8800 GTS with a few tweaks. These tweaks would not be in the GPU chip but rather in the PCB and other parts of the video card. These tweaks allowed the 9800 GTX to run at higher stock frequencies and required two 6-pin power connectors. The G92 chip made another appearance in the 9800 GTX+. This time it was based on a  55nm fabrication process and was codenamed G92b. The change in the fabrication process allowed the G92b GPU to be clocked higher than the 65nm G92 GPU. Other features such as shader processors and memory configuration remained the same. This card still required 2 six-pin power connectors. This was not the last time we would see the G92 GPU. The card I am reviewing today, GTS 250, is based on the same G92b 55nm GPU used in the 9800 GTX+. The GTS 250 has brought with it a shorter PCB and uses just one 6-pin power connector.

To sum up

• 8800 GTS/G92/65nm/1 six pin power connector
• 9800 GTX/G92/65nm/2 six pin power connector/Longer PCB/Higher clock frequencies than 8800 GTS
• 9800 GTX+/G92b/55nm/2 six pin power connector/Same PCB Length as 9800 GTX/Higher clock frequencies than 9800 GTX
• GTS 250/G92b/55nm/1 six pin power connector/Shorter PCB length than 9800 GTX+/Same clock frequencies as 9800 GTX+

If you ignore the subtle changes that Nvidia has made to these cards, you might just call it rebranding, and that seems to be the general consensus among the enthusiast community.

The G92 chip has spanned three generation of Nvidia’s GeForce lineup of video cards, a feat unmatched by any other GPU chip in the history of video cards. This is why I said that this chip is legendary and we will call it “The G92”.

Let’s take a look at what I am reviewing today:

Galaxy, established in 1994, is a Nvidia Add-in-Board (AIB) partner which manufactures products from the low-end GeForce 7200 series to the high-end GTX200 series. They manufacture products based on Nvidia’s reference design as well as using their own in-house production facilities to manufacture graphic cards based on their own designs using high-end coolers from Arctic Cooling and others.

Galaxy has shipped to the US for a long time as they built video cards for many of the tier 1 brands in the market today. They realized they could create a brand for themselves and save the end customer the middleman fees.  Two years ago they launched Galaxy in the US and their products are now available at Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, Dell.com, Newegg, TigerDirect and many other sites.  They have excellent quality and toll-free tech support with a 2 year transferable no-registration warranty.

Specifications

Let’s recap the specifications here.

GTS 250 is based on the G92b GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) from Nvidia. The ‘b’ in the codename indicates that this  chip is fabricated using 55nm process. The G92b GPU uses a 256-bit wide memory interface, and comes with 512 MB or 1 GB of video memory.

More on this card can be found on this page on Galaxy’s Website. Here’s a screen from that page.

Packaging and Accessories

Galaxy’s GTS 250 comes in a fairly attractive box. The box features a spider on its cover, which is a relief from all the mech warriors and CG women with swords featured on some of the boxes from other manufacturers.

The box design and labeling is an important part of catching the consumer’s attention in retail locations especially now that Galaxy sells its cards in Best Buy stores. The box labels the features of the card pretty clearly.  It advertises the 2-year warranty that comes with the card and a toll-free number, should you have any technical difficulties with the card.

On opening the box, a yellow flyer greets you.  Included on it is a tech support number and email if you have a problem with the card.  Although most vendors give a certain time for return if your purchase is out of this time period, you can still setup a RMA with Galaxy by using this email or the toll-free number.

The card comes with all sorts of guides, which is very good for a first time system builder. You get a User Manual, HDMI Installation Guide, Xtreme Tuner guide, hardware installation guide. Additionally you also get the driver CD, Xtreme Tuner CD, S-Video Cable, 2 x Molex to 6-pin PCI-E connectors, SPDIF cable and HDTV adapter.

Included Software

Galaxy Xtreme Tuner

Galaxy ships a software called Xtreme Tuner with this video card. This software can be used to overclock the core, shader or memory on the video card to gain extra performance. Although other similar free software exist in the market, this software can be beneficial to a first time buyer who doesn’t know about other overclocking software like Rivatuner.

It has a very simple interface with sliders each corresponding to the clock frequencies of core, shader and memory. All you need to do to overclock is to push the slider to the right and test for stability. The current frequencies are shown below the sliders as well as the fan speed and the GPU temperature. In addition, the fan speed can bet set manually or set on auto.

Xtreme Tuner can also be used to flash the bios on this card.

An interesting feature of this card is that it ships with dual BIOS. If your BIOS flash goes wrong and you get no display, press and hold the reset button or Ctrl + Alt +  Del for about 10 seconds while turning on your computer; then the secondary BIOS will be activated automatically.

Eye Candy: The Card’s Exterior

Let’s have a look at Galaxy’s GTS 250. Galaxy chose to go with their own design rather than use Nvidia’s reference design.

The card comes wrapped in an anti-static bag. On taking it out we notice that it is a dual slot card, with the cooler exhausting air out of the back of the case. It is a good design choice as cases with low air circulation would get hot if the card were allowed to exhaust inside the case, leading to a rise in the temperature of the other components.

GTS 250’s output options include DVI, TV Out and native HDMI is also present on this card. Users wanting to hook up their PCs to large TVs will appreciate the presence of the HDMI port here.

This card makes use of two 6-pin power connectors. Although the GTS 250 was supposed to have just one 6-pin power connector according to Nvidia’s reference design, Galaxy decided to go with two to aid overclocking. However, the card also runs fine if you plug the power cable from the Power Supply Unit (PSU) into just one connector.

This card features 2 SLI connectors. which means that you can use this card with 2 other GTS 250’s to form a 3-way SLI. This card can be SLI’d with a 9800 GTX+, provided the memory capacity is the same on both of the cards.

Eye Candy:The Card Interior

Time to pop off the hood and take a look at what powers this card. In order to remove the cooler you need to remove the four screws at the back.

After removing the cooler here is what you see

The cooler used here is designed by Cooler Master. It uses a temperature controlled fan which has a maximum speed of 2800 rpm. The cooler is designed for keeping the noise low and is really quiet even at 2800 rpm while cooling the GPU, memory and MOSFETs at the same time. The hot air is blown out of the back of the case.

This card uses a 8-layer PCB employing all solid state Japanese capacitors. 4+1 phase power circuitry i.e 4 for GPU, 1 for memory is used here. Each phase has two power transistors. They are covered by the goldish heatsink in the image on the right below.

The card uses eight 64MB GDDR3 memory chips. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by SAMSUNG and carry the model number K4J52324QH-HJ08. The suffix ‘08′ indicates that the chips have a latency of 0.8ns and are rated to run at 1200 MHz. They use a voltage of 2.05V. Data sheet can be found here (PDF Link) if you want to get your hands dirty with more technical information.

Now lets have a look at the GPU itself. This is a 55nm G92b GPU housing 754 million transistors. To give you an idea of the realistic size of this, I have placed Uncle Sam’s dime on the GPU. The GPU is very slightly bigger than the dime. Goes to show how much technology has progressed. 754 million transistors in an area of nearly a dime. The ‘0902B1′ code on the chip indicates that this GPU was manufactured in the second week of 2009 and uses 55nm fabrication process,as indicated by ‘B1′. The core voltage on the GPU is set at 1.15V.

Software and Test System Used

Test Configuration

Hardware

• Intel Q9450 @ 3.2GHz
• GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4
• GeIL 4GB (2×2GB) 800MHz RAM 5-4-4-12
• Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm CPU Cooler
• Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
• 2 x Western Digital 6400AAKS 640GB SATA Hard Drives
• 1 x Western Digital 250AAKS 250GB
• 1 x SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R SATA DVD Burner
• Cooler Master Silent Pro 600M PSU (Kindly Supplied by Cooler Master)
• Cooler Master Sniper Case

Software

• Windows Vista SP1 x64
• Nvidia GeForce 185.66 drivers
• All settings in Nvidia control panel at default
• PhysX on GeForce GPU’s in Nvidia control panel was disabled
• All games were patched to their latest versions
• Game settings are shown on the benchmark results page
• 1280×1204 resolution was used for these tests as this was the maximum resolution available to me.

Video Cards Used

• Galaxy 9600 GT 512 MB  Low Power Low Profile (Review Here) – 600 MHz/1500 MHz/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Galaxy 9600 GT 512 MB  Low Power Low Profile (Review Here) Overclocked to 716 MHz/1850 MHz/1107 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Palit 9800 GT 1 GB – 600 MHz/1500 MHz/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Galaxy GTS 250 512 MB – 738 MHz/1836 MHz/1100 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)

Overclocking

For overclocking I turned to our gaming benchmarks. I started increasing the clocks 20 MHz at a time and tested with Crysis Warhead. I then found the maximum clocks at which Warhead was stable. Then I tested other games at these clocks; if the benchmarks failed, i backed down the overclock by 10 MHz. The clocks that all the benchmarks passes are shown above in the image. Note that GPU-Z requests clocks from the driver as set in the Rivatuner’s overclocking panel, but Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitoring module requests clocks from the hardware itself which is accurate.  Thus GPU-Z clocks and Rivatuner clocks differ slightly.

Starting from stock clocks of 738 MHz/1836 MHz/1100 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory), I reached the final overclock of 820 MHz/2040 MHz/1320 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory), which is a 11.1%/11.1%/20% overclock on core/shader/memory. The memory overclock is impressive which is finally running at 2640 MHz DDR Speed.

Temperature and Power Consumption

To measure maximum temperature and power consumption, we turn to Furmark. Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests a GPU can undertake. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark – knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.

According to its developer, “FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”

Here are the settings used for temperature measurement and the result on the right:

	Temperature (Max)
Idle	52C
Load	79C

Here are the settings used for power measurement:

	Power Consumption (Average)
Idle	158 W
Load	272 W

Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark’s 3DMark series of benchmarks are the darling benchmarks of the enthusiast crowd. Although they don’t provide real world gameplay indication, they are still a good indicator of system performance and can help determine if something is wrong.

3DMark06 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX9 performance of your graphics card. 3DMark06 is the most downloaded benchmark and the ORB database of 3DMark 06 results, maintained by Futuremark, now contains over 8.5 million 3DMark06 benchmark scores from around the world. Three main graphic tests from 3DMark05 were carried over to 3DMark06 and updated. The tests included in 3DMark 06 feature HDR rendering, shadow mapping, water surfaces created using pixel shaders with HDR refraction, HDR reflection, depth fog and Gerstner wave functions, heterogeneous fog, light scattering and cloud blending, etc.

Nothing out of the ordinary here. GTS 250 is the fastest clocked card and as such it takes the lead.

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

Note: PhysX on GeForce cards was disabled in Nvidia Control Panel.

Race Driver: GRID is the latest addition to the TOCA Touring Car series by Codemasters. GRID is a hybrid between arcade and simulator of mainly road racing that consists of 43 cars featuring very fast racing, awesome graphics, along with a great damage model that leads to some of the most fantastic crashes we have seen in a game. There are several types of competitions for different cars: GT races, open wheel races, demolition derbies, etc.  There are also several tracks from different countries, including Japan, United States and European tracks, such as Le Mans and Spa Francorchamps.  A track racing through the streets of Milan is also available.

Here are the settings we used:

The GTS 250 provides completely smooth gameplay in this game with the FPS never dipping below 80. Overclocking this card is not really needed to get smoother gameplay but it improves performance nonetheless.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (”High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircraft and take them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with satellite data. This game is a more of an arcade take on flying, with the aircraft able to do drifts in mid air like a car does on the road. The controls are easy with the aircraft handling more like a car but it is an immensely fun game.

Settings Used:

HAWX is not able to strain the GTS 250. We see the GTS 250 perform constantly well in the benchmark and better than the 9800 GT.

Call of Juarez is one of the earliest DirectX10 games from the Polish developer Techland. It is a First Person Shooter set in the Wild West, loosely based on a number of Western movie hits which were popular in the sixties and early seventies. Call of Juarez uses the Chrome Engine which utilizes modern game programming technologies and techniques such as  High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapping, relief mapping, self-shadowing using ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering simulating diffusion and diffraction of rays finding their way through translucent objects; realistic water surfaces based on dynamic liquid system, real time HDR reflections and refraction, fading underwater visibility based on distance.

We used the benchmark tool that is added to the game with the patch 1.1.1.0. Here are the settings used:

Call of Juarez is tough on cards. The 9800 GT just does not provide anything close to a smooth gameplay. The GTS 250 does better but it is also not able to provide smooth gameplay. When overclocked it has a 10 FPS lead in average FPS over the 9800 GT and it helps smoothen the gameplay.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is the second game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It is a stand-alone prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The game consists of a roughly 50/50 mix of new areas and old, remodeled areas from the previous game. The X-ray graphics engine, originally used inS.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, has been updated to version 1.5 and includes DirectX 10 support. With patch 1.5.06 the game now supports DirectX 10.1 available on ATI video cards. Additionally, the AI received an overhaul to accommodate the new faction wars feature. Advancements made in 1.5 include volumetric light (a.k.a. ‘God-rays’), volumetric smoke, volumetric fire, soft water, dynamic wet surfaces (with water streaming down the sides of surfaces), depth-of-field blur, DirectX 10 support, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and more.

I used the 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators.

Here are the settings used:

This game is very tough on video cards. The GTS 250 is able to provide the best framerate here due to its extra shaders. Things only get better once it is overclocked.

Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy game (RTS) developed by Relic Entertainment. Company of Heroes is set during World War II where the player commands two U.S. military units during the Battle of Normandy and the Allied capture of France. It makes use of the “Essence Engine”, developed in-house by Relic. This engine makes use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping.Company of Heroes also utilizes the Havok physics engine.

The in-game performance benchmark was used for this test and the results are taken from what is reported by this benchmark at its conclusion. All the latest patches were applied. Here is the settings screen:

This game is not much of a task for today’s graphic cards. Even a 9600 GT without any overclocking is able to play it pretty smoothly. GTS 250 has absolutely no problem. The framerate never drops below 35 FPS.

World in Conflict is a real-time strategy video game developed by the Swedish video game company Massive Entertainment. The story follows alternate reality Earth where the Cold War did not end and Russia won in 1989. The game is set after Russia invaded the USA and the remaining Americans decide to strike back. World in Conflict uses the MassTech Engine which  includes DX9 and DX10 renders, particle systems, vegetation and water rendering and also physics and animation. It is a fast engine, which allows tons of units to be rendered with high realism. The engine was custom made for the game. It handles the rendering of many of the individual elements of the game to make it as realistic as possible like buildings, green stuff, and clouds.

Everything was maxed out. Here are the settings screens:

This is one of the few games that makes good use of multi-core CPUs. The GTS 250 does a good job here beating everything else.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition: Colonies Edition is a gold edition version of Lost Planet:Extreme Condition developed and published by Capcom for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. It has the honor of being the first DirectX10 game. The Colonies Edition includes new multiplayer maps, a Human vs Akrid multiplayer mode, and a selection of new multiplayer characters and weapons. The benchmark areas are also different from the non-colonies edition.

The game uses the MT Framework Engine. MT stands for “Multi-Thread”, “Meta Tools” and “Multi-Target”.

1280×960 was the max resolution available. I used the Area 1 for the benchmark purposes. All other settings were maxed out. Here are the screens

Lost Planet is a very CPU limited game and uses less GPU at lower resolutions.  As such, there is not much difference between the cards at this resolution.

Far Cry 2 is an free roaming first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Although it uses the name of the original of the original Far Cry game, the similarities end right there. Far Cry 2 is a complete different story set in a completely different environment.

Far Cry 2 uses the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft’s Montreal development team for Far Cry 2.  Dunia means “world”, “earth” or “living” in Arabic but also used in many languages with Arabic loanwords including Punjabi, Persian, Nepali, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili.  To portray the African setting in the game as realistically as possible the development team went to Africa to study how things work there. The engine features Dynamic Weather, Dynamic fire propagation (influenced by weather system), Realistic Fire, Physics, Full day/night cycles. Realistic Fire is a high point of this game. It is the best looking depiction of a fire in a video game to date. The engine takes advantage of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 technologies.

I used the benchmark tool that comes with the game. Here are the settings screen:

The GTS 250 can provide a completely playable experience with 4AA at highest quality in one of the best looking games of last year. This goes to show how much performance this card packs.

Crysis series is one of the most beautiful set of games to grace our PC screens to date and they can bring the highest end PCs to their knees.

Crysis Warhead, developed by Crytek, is an expansion to the original Crysis. Crysis Warhead follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes, a formerly Non-Playable Character (NPC) from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island which is during the time period of the first game.

HardwareOC Bench tool was used for benchmarking purposes.   The demo was run 3 times, with the first result discarded.  Here are the settings used:

We are using the highest settings in this game. As a result, smooth gameplay is not possible. But it provides an apples-to-apples comparison of how the two cards fare. The GTS 250 gets you the closest to giving the smoothest gameplay. On lowering a few settings, smooth gameplay should be possible.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.

For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Creek” map while playing online. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console and the results were recorded by FRAPS.

Here are the settings used:

Call of Duty 4 is one of the most popular mulitplayer games these days. With a GTS 250, you certainly cannot go wrong here.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, previously known as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Oblivion Lost, is a first-person shooter computer game by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, published in 2007. It features an alternate reality theme, where a second nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the near future and causes strange changes in the area around it. It features a non-linear storyline which feature role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. The player assumes the identity of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone” which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers.

We are using a custom recorded timedemo for benchmark purposes. The Steam version of this game is used. Here are the settings used:

These cards don’t even break a sweat playing this game.

Video Playback

NVIDIA’s PureVideo is a hardware feature designed to offload video decoding processes and video post-processing from the CPU to the GPU. NVIDIA’s device drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista are PureVideo-enabled.  With the appropriate (PureVideo-enabled) application software, the NVIDIA driver will automatically use whatever hardware-acceleration is available on the NVIDIA GPU. This functionality can help slower CPU’s to be able to play FullHD(1920×1080) content without causing any stuttering issues. The software that offer this functionality are WinDVD, PowerDVD, Arcsoft Total Media Theater which you would have to buy in order to use the acceleration. Free software such as Media Player Classic Home Cinema can also use GPU acceleration. As this card could be used for a HTPC-gaming rig, we decided to check out its FullHD video playback capabilities.

I used Media Player Classic Home Cinema for the playback. The video used was the trailer of movie “The International” available from Divx 7 HD showcase Webpage. This is a 12.3 Mbps 1920×816 video. Here’s the image with video info

This screens show the CPU Usage when played in Windows Media Player using ffdshow decoders.

This screen shows the same CPU Usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitor

Now lets see the CPU usage when the GPU does the decoding. Same video, played in Media Player Classic Home Cinema using GPU decoding.

And this is the CPU usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware monitor.

The difference is amazing, isn’t it?  This feature can allow you to spend less money on a CPU while making a HTPC, because now you know that your GPU would be able to do most of the decoding while keeping the CPU free.

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Conclusion

Galaxy has taken Nvidia’s reference design and made something better out of it. They have catered to the overclocking enthusiast with this card, adding features which should aid them in perfecting their craft. Features like dual BIOS are rarely found on cards even from premium companies like ASUS, EVGA, BFG and Sapphire. Add to it the inclusion of the second external 6-pin power connector to ensure that you overclock is not limited by power. In addition, the 5 phase power regulator supplies clean and efficient power to the GPU and memory. To top it all off, you can buy this card for $69 with this $40 rebate from Newegg, and you have the makings of a great price/performance card. Pair 2 of these in SLI and you will have the power of a GTX 285 for less than $150 provided your rebate comes through. I can’t think of a card with greater Price/Performance in the market right now. The rebate ends on June 30. Get it while it lasts.

Pros

• Dual Bios
• Native HDMI
• Extra external 6-pin power connector for overclocking
• 5 phase power circuitry ensures great overclocking
• Silent Fan
• Short PCB
• Tri-SLI
• Great Overclockability (Overclocked to 820 MHz/2052 MHz/1323 MHz Core/Shader/Memory)

Cons

• Gets hot when overclocked due to silent operation of fan. It would have been better to have the fan spin at more than 2800 rpm at 100% speed to allow better cooling and overclocking.

We are happy to give this card our Great Value Award.