With all the video cards on the market today, which is the right one for you? Even on cards with the same GPU, you have lots of different choices. Clock speeds, outputs, fan noise, cooling efficiency, even PCB color! Gigabyte has long been famous for their non-reference design cards. They take a video card and make it their own.

They've done it again with the latest GTS 250. They've added Zalman cooling for noise reduction as well as better cooling, and they've put an HDMI port right on the card, no HDTV dongle to mess with here. They've used a 2oz copper PCB, Tier 1 Samsung/Hyrix memory, solid capacitors, lower RDS(on) MOSFET, and Ferrite Core chokes. In addition, they've overclocked the memory to 2.2GHz.

The GTS 250 is a recent release of an update to the 9800GTX+ card. While the 512MB version is a direct renaming of the 9800GTX+, Nvidia has even stated they can be run in SLI together, the 1GB version of the GTS 250 receives a die shrink to the 55nm process which produces less heat and consumes less energy.

Nvidia also managed to keep the price down with this card, they retail for $129 for the 512MB version and $149 for the 1GB version. Gigabyte's version of the 1GB card retails for $139.