EVGA 512-P3-1150-TR GeForce GTS 250 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

Reviewed By: Ajay on 11/20/2009

Tech Level: somewhat high - Ownership: 1 day to 1 week

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Excellent Performance, Quiet, No heating Issues.

Cons: Bulky - Make sure your cpu case has sufficient room for 2 slots.

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Solid card

Reviewed By: bakageta on 11/19/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 month to 1 year

This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: -Lifetime Warranty. Make sure you register on EVGA's site, they offer a lifetime warranty and have been excellent about honoring it in the past.

-PhysX support. It makes more of a difference than I expected, and at modest settings it has very few problems.

-Good "budget" performance. It's not the fastest card on the market, and it certainly won't play the latest games with everything maxed out, but I've yet to find a game that it can't come up with playable framerates on at respectable detail levels.

Cons: -Large. Even though it's the smallest of the double-slot cards, don't let it surprise you. This thing will easily span the width of your motherboard over both slots, make sure you don't have any ports or case areas in the way.

-For some reason, the fan on my card doesn't like to manually change speed in EVGA Precision. Occasionally it works right, but most of the time, unchecking Auto and setting a speed will jump the fan to that speed, and within 2 seconds, the fan will jump back down to the previous speed, or occasionally a few percent above or below the previous speed. A friend with the same card has no problems, and it's not enough of a bother to RMA, but it is annoying.

-My card was a fairly mild overclocker, at 800/2400. This is really to be expected, since the card is a rebadged higher clockspeed 9800GTX+, and certaily not enough to knock off an egg for.

Other Thoughts: If you upgrade later you can always keep this card as a dedicated PhysX card. Check your PSU for it's amperage rating. The recommended 24A minimum is for systems with one or two 12v rails, if you have a 4 rail system with one dedicated only to the GPU connectors, 18A is fine on that rail.

I had an older generic 500w psu, with 2 12v rails @ 16A each. It would run EXTREMELY hot while gaming, and died about 2 weeks after I got this card. I upgraded to a name-brand 700w psu, which had no issues at all.

This card can be a great upgrade for pre-built systems, it will fit in quite a few microATX cases from different companies. Obviously do a visual inspection before ordering to make sure.

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Power at a price

Reviewed By: Me. on 11/3/2009

Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 week to 1 month

Pros: I bought this card in NYC to replace an aging 8600GT that I bought off of a friend. I didn't have the money to spring for a 5870 or 4890, and I had the available cash, so I went for this. It's easily the largest card I've ever used, but that's not much, considering that I usually work with low profile systems.
Anyway, this card runs cool while making little noise. It runs Call of Duty 4 at maximum settings and Fallout 3 at pretty high settings. The overclocking tools included are pretty useful.

Cons: Width. Make sure you have space underneath your PCI-E port. It's several inches thick. It's kind of a power hog, and you need to make sure that it's plugged in.

Other Thoughts: It's good if you need a cheap, fairly powerful card. Also looks pretty cool. ;-) Currently runs in my budget build PC.

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