Installation, Testing and Comparison

The ECS GTS 250 is about 9 inches long, shorter than my Diamond 4870 by an inch or so.

Installation was easy, just pop it in my system and away we go. Of course there’s the usual routine of installing drivers etc that needs to be done as well, no big deal there, done it quite a few times…

 I installed it in my Cooler Maste Black Label case on an EVGA NF680i motherboard with an Intel C2Q9650 and 8gigs of ram, running Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit. Yes there are two cards in my system in the pictures, the GTS 250 and a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4870 512MB, but of course they both don’t work at the same time, it’s either one or the other with Vista drivers, you can’t mix and match brands. Normally I run both of the 4870 cards in my system, for a three monitor setup.

For comparison I ran a few benchmarks comparing the GTS 250 1gig card to my Radeon 4870 1gig card, I was curious myself to see what the performance difference was when using a card that costs about half the price. The 4870 goes for about $220, and the GTS 250 sells for about $130, depending where you look of course.

We’ll start off with the old standby, 3dmark06:

Fairly close in performance here with 3dMark06.

Next up is 3dMark Vantage, with Presets set to High.

Here we see a huge difference is the performance of the two cards, with the GTS 250 lagging behind quite a bit.

Next up is Crysis Warhead

Resolution: 1680×1050

2x AA

Gamer Settings

DX10

3 runs averaged out

Here we see the GTS 250 lags behind a bit, but the average framerates are more than playable, both cards drop below the magical 30FPS though for the minimum FPS.

Next test is using SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3 Graphics Memory Bandwidth benchmark.

Graphics (GPGPU) Bandwidth

Benchmark the bandwidth of the memory of the graphics processors (GPGPUs) and the bandwidth of the bus that connects them to your computer.

The speed at which the data can be sent to the GPGPUs, internally processed and the results sent back is as important as the processing power of the GPGPUs. The benchmark is based on the well-known STREAM memory benchmark, as implemented by the CPU memory benchmarks.

Results Interpretation

Internal Memory Bandwidth (MB/s) – higher results are better, i.e. faster internal memory bandwidth.

Data Transfer Bandwidth (MB/s)– higher results are better, i.e. faster data transfer between the GPU and computer.

Here we see the GTS 250 clearly beating the more powerful 4870, then again not by that much. Still though it surprised me that the less expensive card performed better here.

Next up is another from SiSoft Sandra, Graphic Processing Benchmark.

Graphics (GPGPU) Processing

Benchmark the graphics performance of the graphics processors (GPGPUs).

Such operations are used by specialised software, e.g. scientific software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games that make GPU performance pretty important.

Results Interpretation

Processing Float (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better single (32-bit) floating-point performance.

Processing Double (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better double (64-bit) floating-point performance.

As expected the GTS 250 falls behind in this test, the 4870 has a more powerful GPU.

 The final test I’ve got is from SiSoft Sandra again, this one is the Video Rendering benchmark.

Video Rendering

Benchmark the graphics performance of the video adapters (GFXs).

Such operations are used by all graphics software, image manipulation, video decoders/encoders, games and modern operating systems.

Results Interpretation

Float Shaders (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better single (32-bit) floating-point performance.

Double Shaders (Pixels/s) – higher results are better, i.e. better double (64-bit) floating-point performance.

Here we see the GTS 250 dominating again, at least in two of the three tests. Again another surprise here for me, I thought the 4870 would easily best the GTS 250 across the board.

The fan on the GTS 250 can get a bit loud when under load, but not overly so, it is audible over the rest of my system but it’s bearable.

Looking at prices for other GTS 250 cards out there, we find that the ECS GTS 250 is one of the least expensive choices, which of course is a good thing.