Galaxy GTS 250 512 MB Review
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.
You’re not even hitting the card’s limits on Furmark to correctly gauge it’s temperature or power consumption under load. Under res 1440 x 900, MSAA 16x, and post processing; the card starts to throttle as it reaches temperatures of 105 c.
@stridhiryu030363 – I tried to get the card temperature near to the maximum temperature a game would have done. I don’t think any game would be able to heat a card to 105C, unless of course the ambient temperature is very hot.
For Power consumption, I tried to max it. If you use AA, the power consumption is less than with no AA.
Just putting that out there as that is the worst case scenario should a game could put that much stress in the near future. I have an older 9800 gt that doesn’t put out that much heat on the same settings and a friend’s gtx 260 maxing out at 85 c. There’s something wrong with galaxy’s non reference design imo.
Did not know AA lowered power consumption. You’ll think sharpening textures would put more stress on the card.
Karan, were you testing total system power consumption, or just the card’s?
Adding AA to a card should generally increase its load consumption because it works harder.
Update. My card just died. Maybe there was something wrong with mine which caused the overheating. No, I didn’t overheat the thing to death, it just locked up my system and refuses to boot during a gaming session.
Anyone else willing to confirm the temps for me?
@BFG10K – was measuring total system power consumption.
IIRC using high AA saturates the GPU bus, which makes the shaders and texturing units idle while they wait for the AA samples to clear the ROPs.
@stridhiryu030363 – Do you have the same card ?
No game was able to hit the temps Furmark hit in the review.
Yes, I have the same card. Funny thing is, the game I was playing was hardly graphic-intensive so my card stayed around an average of 58 c when it bit the dust.
When I meant confirm the temps, I meant attempt to run Furmark on the same settings I had set to recreate my result. My card died yesterday under very mild conditions of operation so I was just wondering if it was the defect in my card that was causing the high temperatures.
IIRC using high AA saturates the GPU bus, which makes the shaders and texturing units idle while they wait for the AA samples to clear the ROPs.
I’m not sure what you mean by “GPU bus”. Yes, AA hits the ROPs harder but it also hits the memory too. In general the card’s consumption should increase when AA is enabled because the rendering load is higher.
@BFG10K – was measuring total system power consumption
I have a theory then. If the GPU becomes saturated due to AA, the CPU might not be working as hard because it’s waiting for the GPU to catch up, thereby lowering overall system consumption. If you could test just the GPU’s consumption then it should increase when AA is applied.
@BFG10K – It could be the CPU idling as you said. But I didn’t notice any change in CPU Usage with and without AA.
Also it could be the shaders and texture units waiting for the AA samples to clear the ROPs.
Could be a combination of both things.
I have thought of measuring the GPU only power usage, but haven’t come up with a way to do so yet.
Well, finally received my card back from rma and with the same settings as before on furmark, I seem to top out at 96 c after 20 minutes of it.
@stridhiryu030363 – what is your ambient temperature ?
Not sure, I don’t have anyway of checking. It was around 2 A.M. when I attempted this so it couldn’t have been very hot.
@stridhiryu030363 – check the weather on internet or something. What state or country are you in ?
California.
@stridhiryu030363 – that should explain it. it must be hot where you live.
How hot does the card get in games ?
Not at 2 a.m at night.
Right now, 84 f according to google, been folding units all day with folding@home and it’s only at 71 c, 51% fan speed. It’s not a really demanding application. Will stress test again later tonight.
60 f according to google. Same Settings, Same results.
Tops out at 96 c
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