GTS 250 or GTX 275?

I'm planning to swap out my current Gigabyte 8800GT 512 MB somewhere in this or the next month due to seeing that some of my game problems are actually my graphics card messing up and rebooting the PC.

My current setup is this:

- PSU Corsair 650W
- Motherboard Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4
- CPU AMD Athlon64 X2 6400+ Black Edition
- Graphics Gigabyte GeForce 8800GT 512 MB
- 4 GB Corsair Dual Channel RAM
- 1x Seagate Barracuda 80GB, 1x Seagate Barracuda 120GB, 1x WD Caviar Black 1 TB
- OS Windows 7 64bit

Now the two cards I've been looking at are the (as copied from the store sites):
- Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB DDR3 738M
- GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 275, 896MB DDR3, DVI, HDTV

There is about 100$ difference in price between those two in my currency. I'm also looking to run some newer games on top of GW (UT3, Arkham Asylum, FO3, Sacred 2, so on...) and I'm interrested if the performance difference between the GTX and the GTS is actually worth the 100$ price difference.

Go for the HD4890 imo, one of the best cards out there, and has a very low price. It's also one of the best cards to overclock (if you buy it from a good manufacturer). But if you want to stick with nVidia, the GTX 275 is good one too.

GTX 275 is a good bit better than the 250 - if you want to play newer games at 1680 x 1050 or higher resolution ,than the 275 is your best option, regardless of the price difference.

I dunno about Croatia, but in other Eastern European countries I have been in before ATI products are a bit cheaper (the same here in the USA now too) - a HD 4890 is about the same performance wise as the gtx 275, but it's a bit cheaper, so you could check that out (as dimi above said). good luck!

wait for the new 5000/gtx300 series cards coming out very soon

But if you must get one now, my 275 pushes runes of magic (a newish mmo) at anywhere between 40 and 120 fps...usually around 80. Thats on a 2048x1152 on each screen(dual), game runnig on 1 screen.

Don't bother with a gts 250 series, if you're going to bother upgrading it better be a gtx and above, 260, 275, 285, don't forget about ATI cards seen on newegg with rebats an ATI 4890 going for 170$USD to me that screams best performance/price ratio there is atm.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...-review-6.html

Thanks for the reply everyone.

As far as ATI goes here in Croatia, they seem to more or less be the same in prices. I have to admit I'm not too fond of ATI since a few acquaintances had a problem with ATI drivers on their PCs just malfunctioning out of the blue. I also intended to use PhysX where possibile.

@Wrath of Dragons: I'm not really going for the top stuff, as long as it's an improvement, it'll do. I just need to switch out my 8800GT before it decides to do something worse than just rebooting the PC with no error logs.

Well it seems that the only local vendor of the GTX 275 just pulled its selection from their website catalogue so it means they don't have them anymore for now, and I can't find them country-wide at all so I'll have to wait a month or two before I get a card.

Nobody is asking the important question: what games do you play? If Guild Wars is the most graphically-intensive application you use, then the only problem here is that your video card is apparently dying - higher performance is absolutely unnecessary. In that case, buying something on the level of a GTX275 is a complete waste of money.

Well, A GTS 250 is an 8800GT with CUDA/PhysX slapped into it, and a die shrink I think. I doubt you'd get any performance boost over the 8800 with that, and even if you did it'd be a few FPS at best.

correction: it's a 8800GTS, with much higher clock speeds, CUDA support, die shrunk, and with much lower power draw and board size. you'll get a performance boost across the board, but it's not a particularly big jump.

Rahja Edit: Correction: It's sort of like a 9800GTX+ with changes to logic, power enhancements, and smaller PCB dimensions, as well as some minor modifications to memory address function to improve performance.

moriz edit:and the 9800GTX+ is a die shrunk and higher clocked version of a 9800GTX, which just happens to be a higher clocked version of the 8800GTS with CUDA/phyx support. nvidia should fire its marketing people for releasing the G92 core 3980453948523402398 times with minor modifications each time.

agreed, I personally don't think that a 250GTS is enough of an upgrade over an 8800GT to merit the purchase.... go for a GTX 260 at least - or HD 4850 if you want an ATI product.

The GTX260 is a great card, at a great price; as are the GTX275 and the ATi HD4890. This is totally dependent on what titles you play most, as performance varies per title between the GTX275 and HD4890.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150398

^ Great card, excellent price. (Although you won't be able to order it being in Croatia, it gives you an idea of pricing you should look for)

As has been pointed out, the GTS 250 is basically a slightly improved 8800. If you are looking towards playing newer/future games, the performance difference with the GTX275 would be very noticeable.

Well, thanks everyone for the replies.

I'm probably going to go with a GTX275 once they get it back in stock (probably a month or two) and that will hopefully both solve my problems with GW rebooting my PC over and over again, thing I've been troubleshoting for a year now (in weekends, between collegework), and also it's probably going to be a great basis for some of the newer games I plan to try out.