NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Review - PAGE 3

In an effort to have gamers better understand what segment of the market their graphics card fits into, NVIDIA has started associating their products with gaming characters. As of now there are three classes which consist of the "Tank", "Hunter" and "Sniper" classes. The GTS 450 fits into the sniper class and is labeled as such because it is not the biggest, most powerful GPU available, but it is an instrument of precision that will yield great mainstream results.

The GTS 450 in a 8.25" graphics card that has a large black heatsink shroud with green accents that covers the entirety of the PCB. The included fan sits directly in the middle of the shroud and sticks slightly out of the top. This will allow the fan to pull in air from under the graphics card and exhaust it out both ends of the card.

The rear bracket of the GTS 450 uses a dual slot design with a single row of ventilation holes as well as the video output options. These consist of two Dual-Link DVI ports and a single mini-HDMI port. Since the DVI ports use the Dual-Link connection they will support resolutions up to 2560x1600 ,and monitors with a 120Hz refresh. Also, when dual graphics cards are used, the GTS 450 can support NVIDIA 3D Surround, which could make this a great budget option for anyone looking to utilize the technology.

The video options on the reference model are not necessarily universal as some GTS 450 graphics cards will have alternative video options. Some manufactures will opt to use a standard VGA port in place of one of the DVI ports, or change the mini-HDMI to standard size.

The rear portion of the graphics card has a single 6-pin power connector, which will supply the GTS 450 with any additional power beyond 75W. The total power requirement is stated to be just over the 100W mark, so the single power connector will provide more than enough power.

The graphics card secures to the board with a standard PCIe x16 bracket and uses the 2.0 interface that works with any PCIe x16 slot. There is also a single SLI connector on the GTS 450 which will allow for 2-way SLI with an additional GTS 450. NVIDIA has stated the SLI performance gains for this card are incredible (much like the GTX 460) and at just $130 a pop it would not cost an arm and a leg for the setup.

The cooling solution on the GTS 450 uses a low-profile design with a 75mm fan  that really highlights the low heat output of the GF106 core. For the most part this is the cooling solution that will be used by NVIDIA's partners, however, some manufactures will use aftermarket cooling solutions with overclocked versions of the GTS 450.

The reference cards have the core clocked at 783MHz, the shader clocked at 1566MHz and the memory at 902MHz. This card is rumored to be quite the overclocker though, so some manufactures such as ASUS will have overclocked version available as soon as this card hits the market.

The GTS 450 brings to the market a new Fermi GPU, however, unlike the switch from the GF100 to GF104 this one is not as dramatic. This is simply due to the GF106 using the same architecture as its older brother (GF104) but having one less Graphics Processing Cluster (GPC). With only one GPC instead of two, the GTS 450 has four SM's with 48 CUDA cores per SM, giving the card a total of 192 CUDA cores. Additionally, the GTS 450 comes packed with four polymorph engines, 32 texture units, 16 ROP units, two 64-bit memory interfaces (128-bit total) and 1GB of GDDR5 memory. So, the core is essentially half that of the GF104, but it should still pack quite a punch, especially when it comes to DX11 games with heavy tessellation.

In the image of the GF106 architecture you will notice that it does support three memory controllers and three ROP partitions, however, NVIDIA has chosen to disable one of each on the GTS 250 in an effort to create the best price to performance ratio for this product. Since these are already in the core though it seems likely that we could see a model using the additional power at some point.

Overclocking:

Overclocking both the memory and core on the GTS 450 was extremely easy and in the end I was quite happy with the results. the sample card that arrived at our lab was just shy of reaching 950MHz, which is quite an improvement over stock. The overclocking was not limited to the GPU though as the shader clock and memory were able to be pushed to 1846MHz and 2142MHz respectively. With results like these it is no wonder some manufactures are releasing overclocked versions so quickly after launch.