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
card and then the second thing is I'm going to talk a little bit about NC's
Easter Extravaganza which is going to be
um 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
pallet video card Pet's 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 pallet 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 vgi VGA and HDMI let's have a look
at the back it's in about 12 different languages
and um these are all pretty much standard features 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 card 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 going to 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 off NVIDIA.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 uh 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 a weird
location today anyway here's the pallet video card so on the top you find a
custom fan and heat sink 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 uh
we have a slotted cooler here so that means that although this isn't a blower
style heat sink you can see that the air can be exhausted in all directions we
are going to lose a little bit of the heat out 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 SLI 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 mean 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 a on a 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 heat sink 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 all right and then I'm going
to try and give you a better angle on the heat sink camera person think you
can tell me if you've got a good good angle there can you kind of see okay so
the heat sink covers this much of the video card right here and it's just
aluminum fins being blown down on by this fan all right if you have a look
here you can see that the memory is arranged kind of strangely like it's um
kind of all bunched in together here and then it kind of it goes it it's in this
sort of a pattern like the old 6800 and 7800 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 pallette GTS 250 512
Meg and then the code word is
eggplant and if you check out the NC Easter Extravaganza on nc.com then you
will know why you need the code word eggplant