A low-profile DirectX 10 POWERHOUSE from 2008 // Pixel Fragment
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- In this video, we take a look at Sparkle's low profile GeForce GTS 250, and it's a small wonder!
This video had multiple frustrating issues and is uploaded as-is, with some issues still intact and unresolved. I apologize for that, but also I don't care enough to redo huge sections for this little video. So I hope you'll bear with me.
Platform specs:
Core 2 Duo E8600 @ 4.5GHz
2GB OCZ SLI Ready PC2-8500 @ 900MHz
Asus P5K-E (Intel P35)
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS
Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD
Windows XP Professional SP3
Forceware 296.10
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Best thing about this era of Nvidia cards is the audio in header. Having HDMI audio from an SB Live or Audigy is pretty neat.
At that point you’re going from digital audio, to analog, to digital, to analog… there is no purpose in using a soundblaster in that equation, it can only reduce audio quality. But i guess it would be slightly neat
@@dylanrush184 the input is SPDIF and then muxed into the HDMI signal, so it actually stays digital all the way to the end point point.
@@dylanrush184 sorry but your statement is wrong in it's entirety.
Oh, then what is the point of using the soundblaster here? If a digital sound signal comes from a Soundblaster or a digital sound signal comes directly from your video card, either way it’s going to sound exactly the same right?
@@dylanrush184 For supported games it would be much better, since it adds all the fancy hardware sound acceleration (like EAX) to the HDMI signal. Non supported games it would be more or less the same. Also this all really only applies for Windows XP era games.
G92 was everywhere it was refreshed so much. Bunch of different products using the same GPU with different core configurations.
Went from a high end card to being a low end budget card at the end of its life. There is the weird ones like the Dell GTS 240
It was the GPU that refused to go away
@@PixelPipes when you cleaned the card i guess you did give it fresh thermalpaste right ? as that might help a bit with temperatures as well or at least lower the fan curve a bit.
I still have my reference design 8800gt which still holds its own surprisingly well for it lacking anything newer than dx10
This whole era was a family of GPUs that I just slept on, back in the day. Work and home life got stressful and I stopped gaming for a while. Eventually I ended up going from a 6600 GT to a GTS 450. Thanks for the review, err, fragment. It's a card I never knew firsthand.
the luxury of having two hosts made this a refreshing episode :P
lol
This was an amazing era for both the performance and the raw bang for the buck unlike these days.
Sure? Did you remember at the end of 2006 at the beginning of DX10 era? Everything is related to his time.
Mid range Gpu were really awful. HD2600XT and 8600GT-GTS were really bad and sold for 200£. X1950pro was faster and cheaper...
@@Stermy57HW Hardly no one bought those and either saved up for an 8800 GTS 320mb or simply waited for a little longer but at least those two rubbish cards didn't sell for $600-$1000 a pop to scalpers unlike the current gen.
@@MrKillswitch88 ok but the key word is when. 300/350£ for midrange card like 8800GTS 320/640MB was really too much in 2006. Like now 600/1000£ for mid and high cards. It's the same with different prospective.
Agree. And also the Radeon HD 3800 and 4800 series were awesome for their price.
Thanks for playing Bioshock. I remember playing that game on a 7600GT with a Core 2 Duo processor. A "good" frame rate is relative. I thought the game ran really well on my system back then; but by today's standards most people would consider it sluggish.
Thanks for playing Crysis 😄. You answered the question we were all wondering but wouldn't ask.
Interesting video card! I didn't know there were low profile 250s. It's definitely a video card I'll keep in my radar, it's perfect to upgrade those old dell office computers for some decent gaming. Thanks for another one, Nathan! 👍
Would have loved that one for an ITX system back in the day :) Audio is fine, no worries.
Sparkle was a good brand and provides cheap alternative, reminds me of my 9500 GT from late 2000s... Bought it just to play games, not caring about FPS... Ah... I miss good old simple days...
I noticed 720p was the optimal resolution for more graphical intensive games on my 9800gt superclocked. Shadows and AA also tanked performance like crazy. Glad you ran era specific software as well, nothing more irritating than somebody making videos on old hardware and being like "hur dur it runs warzone like shit."
nice video! low profile graphics cards have always been fascinating to me; i use an msi 750ti lp in my windows xp rig. i also like how you have edward hopper's "nighthawks" as the desktop wallpaper!
the high end cards of yesterday, are the low end cards of tommorow.
PixelPipes is back baby!
6:28 I honestly do not believe I’ve seen a low-profile card with a 6-pin connector before. What a truly funky-looking card that is
Love these vintage video card reviews. Awesome work sir.
Welcome back ! Good to see you're settled in at you're new place . Quite the interesting card indeed 🤔
Another use for a card like that in more of a business setting would be for a relatively small PC that could drive 2 1080p (or higher) displays for something like smooth video playback for digital signage/video wall or a projector system. I know back in the late 2000's & early 2010's I would have loved to have been able to use one of those cards instead of the Quadro NVS 290/295 cards I was able to get for the corporate HQ auditorium I helped to run at that time. The 295's were ok for 1080p/30 content but really struggled with 1080p/60 videos which became more common.
These days we take being able to display most 4K content for granted but 10+ years ago you either had to have a high end CPU or a fast GPU to do high bitrate or high frame rate 1080p video playback well.
that framerate during the intro at 13:37 is scary nowadays 😱😅
Great video, thank you! Nice to see what this little card was capable of.
love the look of the old sparkle cards
I recorded a video and for some reason my sound didn't record, so I wrote a script and did a voice over. Not being very experienced at videos I had to record the voice over in small sections because I kept making mistakes
I've done that before! Recording one piece at a time is really the way to go even if you are experienced.
I remember really wanting an 8800gtx and a PhysX card. But I got two 9600s and a PhysX card, instead. I wasn't happy with that setup, though.
I owned a GTS 250 back when I owned my LGA775 Rig and it worked very well for the time and I upgraded it to a 560 Ti later down the road.
The gts250 was everywhere. It was filling a space that the gtx1050 and 1650 fill now
My retro system is a Q9400 running DDR3 memory and a GTX660 3GB graphics card.
Running the original Crysis is really really nice in Ultra.
Mini ITX case, motherboard and Q6600 was given to me for free as 'some dual core'.
Q9400 cost me $12, bought memory for $20, GTX 660 was $30 during the GPU shortage, and I slapped a Sata SSD in there.
Ah, the days of price/performance, nay, affordable graphics cards.
I love the GTS 250
PixelPipes: Pixel Fragment - 28 minutes
I: Yeah, it's alright.
Even with the unresolved crashing issues with team fortress 2, I still feel some nostalgia for my old gtx 285; now long since gone. That thing was my daily driver for the best part of ten years. The "last straw" was simply when I was given a chance to run alien isolation and, it wouldn't start because there was no dx11 support.
I hope someone with your enthusiasm for GPUs is aware that the Xenos GPU used in the 360 was the first GPU actually implemented in consumer hardware with unified shaders and it was way back in 2005.
How strange that the GTS 205 released in 2009 is just slightly faster than AMD Vega 3 on APUs... tho the VEGA 3 is like a GTX 8800. How times fly, you can get iGPUs that perform this good.
yep, but over 10 years later so.
It's so funny looking at the antiquated design of 'low profile' short cards when the modern design is now just use a short riser cable and turn the card on it's side. Keep the full size pcb, full speeds, all the memory, plenty of cooling - Job done.
Honestly that's just the more sensible route
You should consider upscaling the final cut video to 1440/4K and max out the quality into a huge file just for the YT uploading...
Format doesn't matter, the less compression the better during the upscale like even AVI format would do a nice job under the proper settings (but some formats do have limitations).
I do miss the older days when FRAP capture was best quality tool ever, but now this days you need new tools for that job like OBS if you wanna capture raw with hardly any loss.
those gtx 275 co-op physx cards became so hard to come across these days
never knew about this card back then as I was interested in
I actually used to have this exact model of card so i instantly knew what it was
build a pc inside of an old desk radio so heihht was very limited
I remember realizing it was time to get a new GPU when I tried to play Bioshock with a Radeon 9800 PRO. lol That, and the newer ATI drivers stopped working.
I think I had a half-height gaming PC around 2010-2011. At the time you could often take a regular office computer and drop in one of these cards and call it a gaming PC.
Great video! never heard of that card back in the day i had the 8800gt and it was perfect for any kind of game. Then because of work i ended playing games but i keep feeding my mind with any kind of hardware
Speaking of low profile power houses. Radeon HD7750 Low profile Half Height from Sapphire. Still got mine, absolute little trooper for the size.
Yeah! That might be a fun one to try out
@@PixelPipes If you can get two of them it’d be interesting to see if they’ll run in crossfire. :P
Also, there's a low profile gts 450 made by palit, and rebadged as emtek in korean market.
"At the time" 1U servers used GPU's like these with the PSU pins facing the direction this one has though the coolers were generally 2 slot. the server stacks have built in 10w-20watt coolers. I've never seen a fan on one of these types of server cards but maybe the after market board manufacturer bought a bunch and wanted to make it one of thiers... hope this helps shine some light on this odd-ball.
You should cover this card on xp/vista and 7!
GTS 250 was released in 2009.
Isn't it running at PCI 8x because it's not running a game? You have to stress the card with something to pull it out of power saving.
I've not heard of that before but that's an interesting theory
Now, make it report itself as an 8800 and use those oldschool modded GeForce drivers for Win9x
Really like the windows xp background! Can you leave a link? Or under which name to find it? thank you.
That is a very famous painting by Edward Hopper called Nighthawks. Here's the wiki page on it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighthawks_(painting)
@@PixelPipes Thank you. Didn't know about his work. He made some beautifull paintings I see.
I expected a higher frame rate out of Bioshock when compared next to Crysis.
Hey you were finding reasons of who thats for. Don't forget, that design is also significantly cheaper. A small, cheap and powerful graphics card that's basically just an 8800gtx shrunk to a smaller node? 2010 Pat was all about it dude 😎 take my money.
could you do a review of the sapphire 3850 512mb gddr3 agp? i have heard it's the fastest agp card out there and i have one...has an 8 pin power connector and thermal pads on the memory chips which i found very odd.
Imagine if sparkle use dual fan or triple fan on card and also better copper heatpipe aluminium cooler and use stock clock of GT 8800
What is the resolution? 1600x1200?
Yeah it's mentioned a couple times in the video
Can’t get over how far your thumbs bend lol
Pretty sure these were made for upgrading internet cafe 3d capabilities PCs on the cheap.
i have a broke one, believe that it is that old.
I swear I can hear coil whine in the background at 24:05 lmao
This is interesting.
How is the temperature?
Keep watching to find out!
well, it's a shooter. you get shot...
Regarding your sound issues, you should see the videos my lecturers put out for uni XD yours are pro compared to those.
Man, I really want to love this content, but having a boring voice and just rambling literally has me nodding off here.
I use to have the GTX 250, eventually had to upgrade to a HD 4890 1Ghz since at 1080p resolution you find GDDR3 wasn't fast enough...
Took my time to download that GPU-Z, crazy how much a 1060-6GB has to offer regarding specs, like 10x time the Shader and triple the clock speed.
Still that card was day/night compare to any other GPU from the older days, the amount of games you could play with it was just endless.
i.imgur.com/f16hVtq.jpg
Note: That card did run hot, it would throttle down on the speeds to keep bellow 95° but that only happen during torture tests and not during gameplays, I did had my tower completely open on the side so it was the actual card and not my tower. I honestly never had issues with it, the HD 4790 suffer something similar and a bit worst but again it wasn't much of a deal, maybe limit fan speed to 90% and that was more than enough to solve any sound problems.