BFG GTS250 video card Review

DIY-Computer-Repair can help!

Whoa! That is a lot of Geek isn't it?

What does it mean to the everyday user that needs a new video card?

Well I'll break it down for you:

PCI-Express 2.0 interface it the slot type that you will need on the motherboard.

3-way SLI means you can have three of these cards in your computer and connect them up as one video out put, two video out put, or three video output. Than means that you can use the three cards on one monitor, two monitors, or three monitors.

The clock speed is for the processor on the card,  the GeForce GTS 250. For graphics intensive programs the imaging is offloaded from the CPU (Processor) to the video card cutting down on the work the CPU has to do. This is great for programs such as AutoCAD, any program that you would use to render graphics, or for playing Games!

The Max Resolution would require a very large monitor to see small print. How ever with that high of resolution with an image the image would be very clear. This is especially true if you have a HD (High Definition) monitor.

The memory is GDDR3 - Graphics Double Data Rate 3 channel, this means the memory uses three channels to get the data in and out of the memory. Very fast.

The card has 512 Meg of memory but with it being GDDR3 it should be as fast as an older card with say 1 Gig of GDDR2 memory.

The 128 Streaming Processes means that the processor can have up to 128 processes working at the same time, almost the same as Intel's Hyperthreading. Makes through put from the CPU to the monitor very fast and at a higher resolution than older cards.

My PNY GeForce 8500GT died on me. Would you believe on a Saturday night? Yup, that is a major problem for a guy like me that likes to play games!

Now on Sunday I could have went down to the local electronics store and bought a decent video card at twice the price of the one I ordered from Newegg but decided to do my research and find the best possible card for the money I had to spend.

This is the card I found for half of what one the local store wanted for it. The difference is I had to wait three days to get the card and install it in my computer!

And the game I am currently playing needs 128 Meg of memory for the Video, my T-30 laptop only has 32 Meg and it does not share memory with the system. So no games for a while...

The BFG GTS250 arrived, the installation was fairly smooth. The card uses two slots because of the heatsink/fan so I had to move a card to another slot.

When I installed the card (which is quite long for today's cards) I found it was up against the SATA interface cables for two of my hard drives. I had to move a hard drive down a slot and re-route the cables away from the end of the BFG GTS250.

Once installed I started up the computer and installed the drivers. The installer from NVIDIA didn't take very long. After the restart I was back in business!

How ever I have a problem with heat, the temperature for the CPU has risen 4 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit depending on the load on the CPU and file opening or closing.

Part of the problem I discovered was the fan on the GTS25o is set for 40% of operation and the frequency for the MDAC processor is set at the max of 750 MHz. These two factors do not allow the MDAC to cool off when the processor is at or near idle. This the heat increase. The NVIDIA and BFG drivers do not allow for 'Tweaking' the fan speed or the MDAC frequency.

To correct this I had to find a program that I could use to lower the MDAC processor speed and increase the fan speed. The program I found is a very nice program called RivaTuner (http://www.guru3d.com/), quote the help file:

Riva Tuner is a complete powerful tweaking environment, providing you everything you may need to tune NVIDIA GPU based display adapters.

I lowered the MDAC processor speed to 700 MHz and increased the fan speed to 50% and the temperature of the dropped from 96*F to 84*F almost the same before the PNY 8500GT died.

Increasing the fan speed to 75% makes the system stable once again.

I am rating the BFG GTS250 eight out of ten.

Although the graphics improvement over the NVIDIA 8500GT is stunning the locking up of the computer due to the increased heat is bothersome. Because if a non-technical person bought this card they would have a lot of problems with it locking up under load in a normal computer. This video card is for the more experienced user not the novice.

Discover how to upgrade, troubleshoot, or repair your computer the easy way with the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! E-Book

Now off to play one of my favorite games!

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