Today we’ll have a brief get-to-know session with Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 450, Nvidia’s latest offering aimed at those with less than deep pockets. The MSRP for the GTS 450 is €129, although you’ll also find many partner cards, both overclocked and reference clocked, to sell for more or a bit less. Gainward is locked and loaded with its overclocked GTX 460 GLH card and the card comes with non-reference PCB and cooling. We suppose that it will be available at about €130.



The GTS 450 would’ve most probably had a much easier task of justifying its launch had it launched a few months back. Now, many users are not paying much attention to it and are rather hoping to catch a glimpse of AMD’s new series and its performance. Priced at €120, Nvidia’s GTS 450 will have a tough time matching AMD. As far as pricing goes, the GTS 450 is currently aimed at almost a year old Radeon HD 5770, but performance-wise, the card is aimed at HD 5750, which is unfortunately for the green team more affordable. At the same time, the GTS 450 should finally succeed the card known as 9800 GTX+ or GTS 250, as some prefer to call it.  

GTS 450 is based on Fermi architecture, which naturally means DirectX 11 support. We’re talking about GF106, the third in line of Fermi-derived GPUs. GTS 450 does pack some pretty promising gaming performance, especially if the resolutions in question are from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050. Of course, Nvidia didn’t forget about 3D Vision, SLI and True-HD audio bitstreaming support.

The card packs 192 shader processors, 16 ROPs, 32 texture units, two 64-bit memory controllers (128-bit memory interface) and 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The card’s maximum consumption stands at 106W.



Gainward's Expertool utility can come in handy when managing card clocks and fan speed. You will find it on the driver CD.



Reference clocks are 783/1566/900MHz (core/shaders/memory) whereas Gainward’s GTS 450 GLH card runs at 930/1860/4000MHz, making it one of the fastest GTS 450 cards around. Most of the GTS 450 pack shown today is overclocked, which speaks volumes on the GF 106’s nice overclocking potential. In fact, we’re pretty certain that all the GTS 450 cards will run at higher than 900MHz for the core.

Gainward’s GOOD designs are recognizable by “QuattroPorts” – a wide choice of video connectors and Gainward’s choice of cooling. The GTS 450 GLH comes with HDMI, two dual-link DVIs and VGA outs. Most reference designed cards come with two dual-link DVIs and mini HDMI.


The card comes with one SLI connector, enabling for 2-way SLI, and is powered via one 6-pin power connector. The cooler is almost inaudible during gaming while FurMark testing temperatures didn’t exceed 73°C.


Our results are showing that only high factory overclocked Gainward GTS 450 GLH saved the day for Nvidia.

Testbed:

Motherboard: EVGA 4xSLI
CPU: Core i7 965 XE (Intel EIST and Vdrop enabled)
Memory: 6GB Corsair Dominator 12800 7-7-7-24
Harddisk:   OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB
Power Supply: CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 800W
Case: CoolerMaster HAF X
Fan Controler: Kaze Master Pro 5.25"
Operating System: Win7 64-bit
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10.8 CCC






















Stay tuned for the full review.