The Card

Looking at the card for the first time, we can see another reason why rehashed models aren't a bad idea. Because they've been around for so long, there are usually some good aftermarket coolers available by now.

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In this case Galaxy has taken advantage of that and decide to use an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo cooler, which you can clearly see packs dual fans along with a number of copper heat-pipes protruding from the bottom. Behind the two fans we can see all the aluminum fins which help get the hot air away from the GPU.

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Having a closer look at the card, we can see that it uses dual 6-pin PCI Express connectors for its power. Just behind the cable we also have another small connector that is used in with the SP/DIF loop-back cable to get sound through the HDMI port.

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Closer to the front of the card we have two SLI connectors; what this means is that we can have up to three of these cards running at the same time. This might be a bit difficult, though, with the cooler taking up just over two slots.

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Finally, looking at the I/O side of things we can see that Galaxy has missed it up a bit. While we do have the standard Dual-Link DVI connector and TV-Out port, Galaxy has also taken the time to place a native HDMI port on this card.

Specifications

As you would expect, the GTS 250 uses the same clock speeds as the 9800 GTX+. As you can see below, we have a core clock of 738MHz while the shader comes in at 1836MHz and the 1GB of GDDR3 memory comes clocked in at 2200MHz DDR.

It was interesting to see that Galaxy didn't choose to overclock the card, since they had gone to so much effort to install a new cooler on it and change the I/O side of things. If you do want to overclock, though, you can fire up Xtreme Tuner and do it yourself.