Installation and Operation:

A system with the following components was used for this review:

» Intel Core i7 920 quad core processor
» Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R LGA 1366 X58 ATX motherboard (BIOS F6)
» G.Skill 6GB PC3-12800 DDR3 triple channel memory (1600MHz, 9-9-9-24)
» Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» TSST Super WriteMaster optical drive
» Nesteq EECS 700 Watt power supply
» Windows 7 RC 64-Bit operating system

The screenshot below provides details regarding the ASUS ENGTS250 1GB GTS 250 video card by Techpowerup.com's GPU-Z.



For the most part, the data shown above matches what is indicated on the list of official specifications. One issue is that GPU-Z apparently can't distinguish 55nm technology yet, and lists it as 65nm. I was also curious to see whether the memory was going to be listed at 2200MHz, or 2000MHz. Some sites (like Newegg.com's listing) indicate 2200MHz, and at one point I wound up on the specifications for the 512MB version of this card at the ASUS site, despite not trying to navigate there intentionally. The 512MB version has memory at 2200MHz.

Testing:

For comparison purposes, the ENGTS250 1GB GTS 250 was tested against the following other cards:

» Sapphire 1024MB Radeon HD4890
» Leadtek Limited WinFast 896MB GTX260 EXTREME+
» Sapphire 512MB Radeon HD4770
» Sapphire 512MB Vapor-X Radeon HD4850
» Sparkle 512MB GeForce 9800 GTX+

All Radeon based cards used the Windows 7 64-Bit approved version of the Catalyst Control Center version 9.5. All Nvidia based cards used the Windows 7 64-Bit approved version of Forceware 185.85 (and PhysX was enabled).

The tests to be executed include a look at the Windows 7 Experience rating, one synthetic benchmark, four benchmarks included with 3D games, thermal testing, and some power consumption testing. Each card was run through the following tests, and the system was rebooted between each run.

» Windows 7 Experience
» FutureMark 3DMark Vantage
» Crysis (DirectX 10)
» World in Conflict (DirectX 10)
» Lost Planet (DirectX 10)
» Company of Heroes (DirectX 9)
» Thermal Testing
» Power Consumption Testing

Windows 7 Experience:

Windows 7 has a simple benchmark built in to analyze the performance of a few system components. We will look at the gaming graphics and desktop graphics scores, as they are the only ones that should change from one graphics card to the next. Higher is better for these results, and the highest possible score is 7.9.



As I expected, the GTS 250 put up the same numbers as the 9800 GTX+, which happen to be the lowest of the cards on hand.