Palit GTS250 [Review]

Finally, today, we'll have some real apple-to-apple comparison between the GTS250 and the Radeon HD4850. After Zotac's Amp Edition showing good promise, it's time we took Palit's 512MB version for a spin. If you're familiar with their work, then you will know by now that Palit loves experimenting with design; in fact, they love it so much that they went ahead and created the biggest and fastest card ever, the Revolution 700 (three slot cooler anyone?). They've done it again. Palit has stripped off the reference cooler and gone for its own heat pipe cooler with a large, centrally located fan. They also offer you a more diverse set of connectors, out-of-the box, while still maintaining the low price that we've all come to love from this brand.

From the GPUz screenshot we can see that the core speed has been increased from the default 738Mhz all the way up to 745MHz, which is just 5MHz shy of Zotac's Amp edition speed. Of course, the shader and memory speeds have also been increased to levels similar to that of Zotac.

This is where the fun begins. We have two very similarly clocked graphics cards from two manufactures - one with 512MB of memory and the other with 1GB. We can now see for ourselves if the extra memory makes a major difference in performance.




Bundle

Palit seem to have ditched the green-themed box for Nvidia cards and have gone for yellow ones. We have Frobot up front encouraging owners to tweak their cards for more performance.

As usual, Palit bundles just the basics with the card, without any game or software.

-Instruction manual
-Driver CD
-6-pin to Molex power converter
-HDMI to DVI adapter
-SPDIF connector

Palit has chosen a very simple and functional design for their cooler, which I really liked. We have the aluminum heatsink in the center with the large fan blowing air directly on to it. The rest of the card is covered with a plastic shell with plenty of slits for good air flow. It's still a dual-slot card though, which could have easily been avoided.

It's been a while since I've seen a VGA port on a mid-range card. Palit even throws in an HDMI port instead of the usual adapter. What they do provide is a HDMI to DVI adapter in case you want to connect two LCD monitors.

We can see the two aluminum heat pipes just beside the SPDIF connector. What's interesting is the two 6-pin connectors instead of one. Even the reference design has a single 6-pin connector, or on some versions an 8-pin. Does this mean it requires more power? Well, not necessarily, as we'll soon find out after the testing.

On removing the heatsink, we have a clear view of the core and the memory chips surrounding it. Only the heat sink makes contact with the core. The memory chips are cooled with the help of the fan.

Upon closer inspection we see that the heatsink comes with a copper base, which is in contact with the core and is a better conductor of heat. The pipes then carry the heat and distribute it through the aluminum fins, which are then cooled by the fan.

Testbench

CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme X9770 at 3.2 GHz

Motherboard: Asus Rampage Extreme

RAM: 2 x 1GB DDR3 1600 MHz Corsair Dominators

HDD: Hitachi 250 GB SATA II (7200 rpm)

PSU: CoolerMaster 1000W

Cabinet: CoolerMaster Mystique

Monitor: Viewsonic G90fB monitor (19-inch, Max Res. 1920 x 1440)

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate

VGA Driver: Forceware 182.08, ATI Catalyst 9.3

Benchmarks

3DMark 06

3DMark Vantage

World in Conflict (DX 10)

The High Conflict graphics quality preset was chosen and the AA and AF settings were changed in the Advanced Graphics section. 4x AA and 16x AF were selected after benchmarking with no AA and no AF. Filtering and AA were set as Application Controlled in the drivers.

Overclocking and Power Consumption

We fired up RivaTuner and started pushing the core upwards, until I finally hit a wall at around 830MHz. After this, we turned our attention to the memory, but as it's already overclocked it didn't go much further. The final clocks were 830MHz for the core and 2125MHz for the shader, and memory was bumped up just a little to 1160MHz. Just like the Zotac card, we didn't get any major boost in performance due to the aging G92 core. 3DMark 06 returned just 15957 points and 3DMark Vantage returned just 7630 points. Even though the card remains stable at these high speeds, we don't see much of a performance increase, and this is mainly due to the chip.

This is certainly interesting; on idle the Palit GTS250 consumes the same amount of power as the 9800GTX+ and the HD4850. But on full load, it has the lowest power consumption on full load, which was a little surprising. The card runs absolutely cool; even when you touch the heat pipes, you can barely feel the heat. The fan is not noisy as it spins at a low rpm, but it is audible on load. This just goes to show that power consumption calculations should not be based on how many connectors the card has.


Pricing

Palit has once again priced their card very competitively at just Rs. 8900, all inclusive, which makes it the lowest priced GTS250 (512MB) with a custom cooler. On the other hand, ATI has dropped their pricing even further for HD4850, and you can actually find a Palit HD4850 for as low as Rs. 7900, which continues to offer more value.

Conclusion

What have we learnt so far? Well, one of the reasons, we chose the 512MB card was to compare it head on with the Zotac 1GB card, since they both were clocked at pretty much the same speed. So does the extra 512MB make a significant difference? Well, yes and no. If you're going to play at a resolution lower than 1920 x 1200, then no, it's not going to make much of a difference. However, if you do own a 24-inch monitor and above and love lots of Anti-Aliasing, then it does, especially in Crysis, where it can, actually make the game playable (check the graph). The biggest gainers were the Unreal Engine, CryEngine 2, and World in Conflict at a full HD resolution with high levels of AA. Of course, for that, you have to pay a small premium of around 1K more.

Palit's GTS250 is currently the cheapest card that you can get, and it comes with a very attractive heatsink, which is functional. You also get all the possible connectors you would want, including HDMI. Due to the large fan, the card runs cool and you'll probably never face any heating issues.

On the other hand, Palit could have gone for a more slimmer design and made it a single-slot card. It looks classy, but it's really unnecessary given the 55nm fabrication and low power requirements. So, does this steal the crown from the HD4850? Not quite. Sure it's powerful, but again not by a big margin to justify the price. If you're an Nvidia fanboy and will not touch anything else, then the Palit GTS250 certainly fits the bill, showing strong performance as compared to its competitors. However, if you want the best value for money mid-range card, then the HD4850 still holds its own for 1K less.

Specifications

source : http://www.techtree.com/India/Reviews/Palit_GTS250_Review/551-100670-537-12.html