Introduction

The graphics industry certainly works in mysterious ways. Sometimes we see products released as a respin, a product that is altered, a little customized but in essence the same product as before. NVIDIA is a star when it comes to this. Last year they introduced the GeForce 9800 GTX+, an update from the standard 9800 GTX, yet now based on 55nm technology and slightly faster. It was NVIDIA's answer to ATIs Radeon 4850.

This week we are landing in March, it's CeBIT (exhibition) time and as such traditionally NVIDIA always releases new products. This year they have GeForce 3D Vision and their ION platform in the lineup, next to that .. a 'new' graphics card. Well, redesigned yes, not exactly new though. NVIDIA is respinning the GeForce 9800 GTX+, this card is now rebranded as GeForce GTS 250.

Though the board design itself definitely has changed, in essence the product is feature and performance wise 98% similar to that GeForce 9800 GTX+, even with the same clock speeds and 128 stream processors, the same 55nm G92b graphics processor. Its clock-speeds are 738/1836/1100 MHz (core/shader/memory), on par with reference 9800 GTX+ speeds. The card will have the same 512/1024 MB of GDDR3 memory and the very same 256-bit memory bus.

Why would this product be interesting then you ask ? Well, though I agree all this not as exciting as a new product release, there are a couple of pointers interesting. For example, a new PCB design, making the card smaller (9" in length). Lower power consumption, only need for one 6-pin power connector and most definitely interesting. NVIDIA lowered it's price significantly.

The GeForce GTS 250 will launch this March, with 512MB and 1GB models, at $129 and $149 respectively.

Of course we'll show you everything about it's performance in this review.

The GeForce GTS 250 will come in as standard at 512 MB and 1 GB configurations, partners will be free to use their own designs as well. Some partners have even been working on a 2 GB model. One such partner is Palit, and a couple of days ago we received such a customized version of the GeForce GTS 250, packed with a nice cooling design, small PCB and and alarmingly high 2048 MB of memory. All in all, these are plenty of new features to grant it a review alright, so let's start up the article, but not before we show you what we are reviewing today.

Yeah that's not at all looking bad huh ? Next page please.