Gadgetory

two things first of all I'm going to be unboxing and having a quick look at a pallet geforce GTS 250 512 Meg video cart and then the second thing is I'm going to talk a little bit about NCIX is Easter extravaganza which is going to be running for the month of March and is the reason for my ridiculous outfit containing some ridiculous colors not that I don't normally wear the hat in particular anyway first of all why don't we get going on the unboxing this is a palette video card palettes big thing is that they always have custom PCBs so that means that they use high quality components for all their power delivery and they say you get better performance out of a palette card because you get better overclocking play it tweak it get more out of it that's their slogan okay this is an HDMI card it has dual link DVI VGA and HDMI let's have a look at the back it's in about 12 different languages and these are all pretty much standard feature so why don't we get this thing open and have a look okay here we go so we got the video card first but why don't we have a look at the accessories before we really get into the video part itself so the first thing we find is one of those little audio cables that I'm pretty sure nobody uses but it's included just in case then we have a two molex to one PCI Express power adapter so I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that this card needs an external PCI Express power connector then we have a quick installation guide which I'm just gonna look at myself here shows you how to install the drivers it does not include any installation instructions for the hardware aspects of things and I mean really these instructions are mostly irrelevant anyway because you shouldn't be using the included driver CD you should be downloading the latest drivers often video.com so why don't I put this back inside here and let's get this video card out of the box just finished watching the men's hockey game where they totally won so I'm just still here in front of the TV that's why I'm kind of in weird location today anyway here's the palette video card so on the top you find a custom fan and heatsink combination which is very very standard even though it's a non-standard heat sink for a pallet video card because they do all use custom PCBs and coolers on the back we're going to find HDMI VGA and DVI as advertised then we have an arrow slot we have a slotted cooler here so that means that although this isn't a blower style heatsink you can see that the air can be exhausted in all directions we are going to lose a little bit of the heat on the back of the case via these vents this is a standard PCI Express oh this is weird this is a GTS 250 but it doesn't have an SLI an SLI connector look at that there's no SL like I was about to say it's got your standard SLI connector and PCI Express 16x interface but it only has one of them that's funny I need GTS 250 can run in SLI mode without a connector and performance probably isn't going to be impacted much but that's still a very strange thing to see on the on the card of this caliber anyway okay why don't we come around to the back and we see some of the power delivery there you can see it's covered in a giant heatsink that covers most of the video card I'll try and get you a better view of that in a minute and then we have our PCI Express 6x power connector right here you have the power for the fan alright and then I'm going to try and give you a better angle on the heatsink camera person I think you can tell me if you've got a good good angle there can you kind of see it okay so the heatsink covers this much of the video card right here and it's just aluminum fins being blown down on by this fan alright if you have a look here you can see that the memory is arranged kind of strangely like it's some kind of all bunched in together here and then it kind of it goes it's in this sort of a pattern like the old sixty eight hundred and seventy eight hundred series cards and it's 512 megs overall on this particular video card I wish I could show you more of it but I mean that's all I can really do so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the palette GTS 250 512 Meg and then the code word is eggplant and if you check out the NCIX Easter extravaganza on NCI XCOM then you will know why you need the codeword eggplant