The G92b chips were manufactured on 55nm tech process in Taiwan. They are revision B1 and differ with the week of manufacture and the third line of the marking.

Each GPU incorporates 128 unified shader processors, 64 texture-mapping units, and 16 raster operators. The ROP/TMU frequencies are 745/1848MHz which is just a tiny bit higher that the reference GeForce GTS 250’s frequencies (738/1826MHz). These GPUs do not have a power-saving mode.

As these two cards have different amounts of GDDR3 memory, you can guess that they have different memory chips. Indeed, the 1GB version comes with Samsung K4J52324QH-HJ08 chips (0.83ns, a rated frequency of 2400MHz) whereas the 2GB version comes with Hynix H5RS1H23MFR N2C chips (0.8ns, a rated frequency of 2400MHz).

Oddly enough, the 1GB version has a memory frequency of only 2000MHz, which is 200MHz lower than the reference card’s. The 2GB version has a memory frequency of 2200MHz. You should keep this fact in mind if you are choosing between these two products.

The card’s characteristics are overall as follows:

The cooling system is downright primitive. Its top part is a plastic casing with an 80x15mm fan.

The 9-blade fan was manufactured by Everflow (the R128015BH model). Its speed is varied by the card in an unknown range (the fan performance is reported in percent rather than rotations per minute).

This fan cools a rather small heatsink with a copper base and two copper nickel-plated 6mm heat pipes that carry thin aluminum ribs soldered to the base.

The memory chips on both sides of the PCB are cooled with aluminum plates that have thermal pads.

The graphics cards’ coolers were tested according to the same method as was used for the above-discussed Radeon HD 4770. They proved to have identical temperatures so I will only show you the results of the 2048MB version.

Unfortunately, the cards’ power components and PCBs are not equipped with thermal sensors but you can see that the GPU is not very hot. The coolers are loud, but I will discuss the noise factor later on. When I installed an Accelero Twin Turbo, the GPU was no hotter than 57°C although the temperature reduction did not affect the cards’ overclockability. By the way, neither sample of Palit GeForce GTS 250 did particularly well at overclocking.

The 2GB version of the card is $15-20 more expensive than the 1GB one. You can email me for the cards’ BIOSes.