Beside the fact that “new” GTS250 uses the same chip as almost two year old 8800GTS, NVIDIA decided to ditch cooling solution used on 9800GTX and instead used cheaper and smaller cooling solution used on older 8800GTS with 512MB. Of course, now this new GTS250 looks the same as old 8800GTS. This is not that big problem since the graphics card is significantly smaller because of this cooling solution that is perfect fit for an 55nm GPU. NVIDIA specified frequencies are: 738MHz for GPU, 1836MHz for Stream processors and 2200MHz for memory. If those numbers seems familiar, you are not wrong. Identical frequencies has GeForce 9800GTX model. Since all other detail about this card we mentioned several times in our review of 8800GTS and 9800GTX we will go straight to features of ZOTAC model that we got in our test lab.

ZOTAC GTX 250 AMP! Edition 1GB

ZOTAC started as small company that produced NVIDIA graphics cards that always followed NVIDIA’s referent design. With minimal bundle package and low price, graphics cards from ZOTAC found their home in a large number of configurations. Since these days three years have passed and ZOTAC has progressed a lot and results are obvious when you take a look at their products nowadays. Graphics card that we got belongs to manufacturer overclocked series of AMP! Edition graphics cards. This means that our GTS 250 AMP! should perform better then referent NVIDIA card. In the package, that we like a lot, can be found DVI-to-VGA and DVI-to-HDMI converters along with XII Century: Death of Glory game.

ZOTAC didn’t change referent NVIDIA design at all, so characteristic green PCB is base for this graphics card also. ZOTAC, as almost all other manufacturers, decided to change sticker on fan and cooler. Cooling solution is referent but we must admit that this model produces lower noise levels than GeForce 8800GTS. Lower temperatures are consequence of changed manufacturing process (55nm). Because of these properties fan on this card hasn’t reach 100% RPM too many times. Even on 70% of maximum RPM fan was almost noiseless in case it is placed into quality chassis. Power consumption of this card is for 10W lower than 9800GTX+ or almost identical power consumption of 8800GTS. ZOTAC knew that GPU cannot overclock too much without investment into better cooling system so it raised frequency of GPU for 12MHz compared to default values. Memory frequency on the other hand is raised significantly: for 100MHZ compared to values that NVIDIA defined (2.2GHz).  All this didn’t have too much effect but increase of 5% compared to referent design is obvious. Further overclock of this model didn’t result with significantly better results: we achieved 795MHz for GPU and 2360MHZ for memory.