NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Mainstream GPU

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Mainstream GPU - Page 3
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 03, 2009, 03:00 AM EDT

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on an Asus Striker II Extreme motherboard powered by a Core 2 Extreme QX9770 quad-core processor and 4GB of Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and NVIDIA Powered

Hardware Used:
Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (3.2GHz)

Asus Striker II Extreme
(nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset)

Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Radeon HD 4850
GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 OC
GeForce 9800 GTX+
GeForce GTS 250
EVGA GeForce GTS 250 Superclocked

4096MB Corsair DDR3-1333 C7
(4 X 1GB)

Integrated Audio
Integrated Network

Western Digital "Raptor" 150GB
(10,000RPM - SATA)

Relevant Software:
Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
DirectX November 2008 Redist

NVIDIA Forceware v182.08
ATI Catalyst v9.2

Benchmarks Used:
3DMark Vantage v1.0.1
Crysis v1.21*
Left 4 Dead*
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5*
FarCry 2

* - Custom Benchmark

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1,920x1,200, with 4x anti-aliasing an 16x anisotropic filtering.

The 3DMark Vantage results show just how closely matched the GeForce 9800 GTX+ and GeForce GTS 250 are with the Radeon HD 4850. All of the mainstream boards finish within a few points of one another, here. The results also show the large gap of available performance to be gained by spending a bit more money and opting for a GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4870.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, graphics, GPU, video

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com