In our recent poll "Is NVIDIA's rebranding strategy helpful?" we saw 48% of people reply that they want to see innovation when a new product is released. While NVIDIA claims there is some innovation in making a 1 GB version I disagree. At least Palit did something to top that and came up with a 2 GB version of the card. Unfortunately there is very little to no gain from going 2 GB. Even if we assume that there are some gains at 2560x1600 with lots of AA, the card's limited shading power will slow down any such games to unplayable framerates (~15 FPS). Also the power consumption is higher which may turn some green users away. While I don't have any numbers, I could imagine that 2 GB are able to make a difference in specialized scientific CUDA applications that need to process large data sets.
Palit's cooling solution can keep the card relatively cool, but does so with a fairly large amount of noise, which is too much for an upper midrange card. I suggested to Palit that they look at some possible fan setting optimizations, so maybe this can be fixed in the near future.
Overall my opinion is that the GeForce GTS 250 is mainly a renaming of an existing product to more properly reflect NVIDIA's naming scheme. While the 1 GB GTS 250 is priced quite competitively I would just spend a bit more and get a HD 4870. Palit's 2 GB card is certainly a very interesting experiment but probably too early. Most titles don't even use 1 GB of video memory.