Nvidia released their latest Geforce GTS 450 GPU. It's mainly aimed at the mainstream market, and should appeal to many users including the occasional gamer and your average SOHO user. But there's one thing which I find interesting ... Nvidia claims that their lastest Geforce GTS 450 offers killer performance at a sweet price. But is this really true? We've already looked at their Geforce GTX 460 last month, and we believe it's currently the best graphics card available on the market in terms of both performance and price. Can their new Geforce GTS 450 GPU do any better?
We always hear about products for high-end and enthusiast markets, but the truth is ... it's a very niche market and amount to only a tiny percent in sales for most manufacturers. The real profits are in the massive mainstream market, and this is where fierce battles and competition takes place ... just to capture some of this market share. For Nvidia to release their Geforce GTS 450 GPU in the 4th quarter of 2010, is a well planned strategy ... why? Because AMD is about to release their next Radeon HD 6xxx series of graphics cards code-named "Cayman". So in order to phase out any inventory that Nvidia may have ... now is the time to do it. Once done, Nvidia can then concentrate on their next Geforce series.
Looking at the specifications of the Geforce GTS 450 GPU, it offers all of the innovative features of their higher-end GTX models, such as support for 2-way SLI, CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. It looks like Nvidia may have answered the calls of the mainstream gamers ... to produce a graphics card that offers decent performance at good price. However, there are some important aspects of the Geforce GTS 450, which is why it's classed as a mainstream product. These include the fact that it uses a lower number of processing cores and memory interface of 128-bit. Take a look at the comparison table below, between a GTX 460 and the newly released GTS 450.
Geforce GTX 460
Geforce GTS 450
Processing Cores
336
192
Graphics Clock (Mhz)
675
783
Processor Clock (Mhz)
1350
1156
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)
37.8
25.1
Memory Interface
256-bit
128-bit
Memory Bandwidth (Gb/Sec)
115.2
57.7
In this review, we'll be taking a look at the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone (N450GTS). It features an overclocked GPU which runs at 850Mhz (default is 783Mhz), and comes with 1Gb of GDDR5 ram clocked slightly higher at 2000Mhz. It uses a 128-bit memory interface, and has a total of 192 procesing cores (as described in the table above). Furthermore, MSI have also included their Afterburner overclocking utility, which is an added bonus for anyone who wishes to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the Geforce GTS 450.
For cooling, MSI have included their own in-house designed GPU cooler, which they claim can offer upto 17℃ lower in termperature over reference designs. This Cyclone GPU cooler features a Nickel-plated copper base for better dissipation, as well as a rounded design for dust free operation. It certainly looks very impressive, but it perform as good as it looks?
Since this is a mainstream graphics card, I will not be expecting eye-popping performance that will beat the higher-end cards. However, I am expecting the card to cope with all of our DX11 tests, and I'm hoping it will produce some respectable scores at least. It will be interesting to see how well, MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone will compare against the Radeon HD 5770 and its bigger brother, the Geforce GTX 460.
We'll be testing the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), MSI P55A Fuzion motherboard, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer, Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler and a Silverpower 650w power supply. All-in-all, a decently spec'd computer system.
OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone OC Edition with 1Gb GDDR5 ...
‧NVIDIA GeForce Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) ‧Microsoft Windows 7 Support ‧NVIDIA PhysX Technology ‧Microsoft DirectX 11 Support ‧NVIDIA CUDA Technology ‧NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready ‧Hardware Decode Acceleration ‧PCI Express 2.0 Support ‧OpenGL 4.0 Optimization and Support ‧OpenCL Support ‧DirectCompute 5.0 Support ‧32x Anti-aliasing Technology ‧Dual-link DVI Support ‧HDMI 1.4 Support ‧NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology ‧Dual-stream Hardware Acceleration ‧Dynamic Contrast Enhancement & Color Stretch ‧Dual-link HDCP Capable ‧High-Quality Scaling ‧Bad Edit Correction ‧Edge Enhancement ‧Enhanced Error Resilience ‧Noise Reduction
• All brand name & products are registered trademarks of their respective companies. • All Chipset specs are derived from Nvidia data sheet. For your reference only.
Features
Cyclone Thermal Design - 9cm PWM Fan for 50% more airflow. - Nickel-plated copper base for better dissipation - Rounded design to prevent keeping dust. - 17℃ cooler than reference design.
MSI Afterburner overclocking utility - Support Over-voltage function of GPU. - Support advanced fan speed control. - Support burn-in stability test.
All Solid Capacitor - 10 years ultra long lifetime (under full load). - Lower temperature and higher efficiency. - Aluminum core without explosion.
PhysX & 3DVision Surround technology - Support PhysX technology effects for realist physics effect. - Support 3DVision Surround technology to provide 3 monitor output simultaneously and real 3D image experience. (NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround requires NVIDIA release 256 driver, two or more graphics cards in NVIDIA SLI configuration, 3D Vision glasses, and 3D Vision-Ready displays.)
Nvidia Geforce GTS 450 GPU
Overview
Designed with unparalleled levels of price/performance, NVIDIA® GeForce® GTS 450 is the perfect GPU for LAN party pwning. With more than 2x the DirectX 11 geometry processing power over competing GPUs*, GeForce GTS 450 dominates the competition and offers amazing game realism on the latest DirectX 11 titles like Civilization V. Equipped with the latest industry leading technologies including NVIDIA® 3D Vision™, NVIDIA® PhysX®, high performance NVIDIA GeForce drivers, and more, GeForce GTS 450 has everything you need to spoil your senses.
GPU Specifications
GPU Engine Specs:
Processor Cores
192
Graphics Clock (MHz)
783 (MHz)
Processor Clock (MHz)
1566 (MHz)
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec)
25.1
Memory Specs:
Memory Clock (MHz)
1804
Standard Memory Config
1GB GDDR5
Memory Interface Width
128-bit
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)
57.7
Feature Support:
NVIDIA SLI®-ready*
2-way
NVIDIA PureVideo® Technology**
HD
NVIDIA PhysX™-ready
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
Microsoft DirectX
11
OpenGL
4.0
Bus Support
PCI-E 2.0 x16
Certified for Windows 7
NVIDIA 3D Vision Ready
Display Support:
Maximum Digital Resolution
2560x1600
Maximum VGA Resolution
2048x1536
Standard Display Connectors
Two Dual Link DVI-I Mini HDMI
Multi Monitor
HDCP
HDMI***
Audio Input for HDMI
Internal
Main Features
Microsoft® DirectX® 11 Support DirectX 11 GPU with Shader Model 5.0 support designed for ultra high performance in the new API’s key graphics feature, GPU-accelerated tessellation.
NVIDIA PhysX® Technology Full support for NVIDIA PhysX technology, enabling a totally new class of physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience with GeForce.
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Ready* GeForce GPU support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, bringing a fully immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC. A combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software, 3D Vision transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. In addition, you can watch 3D movies and 3D digital photographs in eye popping, crystal-clear quality.
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Surround Ready** Expand your games across three displays in full stereoscopic 3D for the ultimate “inside the game” experience with the power of NVIDIA 3D Vision and SLI technologies. NVIDIA® Surround™ also supports triple screen gaming with non-stereo displays.
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics simulation, ray tracing, and more, delivering incredible performance improvements over traditional CPUs.
NVIDIA SLI® Technology*** Industry leading NVIDIA SLI technology offers amazing performance scaling for the world’s premier gaming solution.
32x Anti-aliasing Technology Lightning fast, high-quality anti-aliasing at up to 32x sample rates obliterates jagged edges.
NVIDIA® PureVideo® HD Technology**** The combination of high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video.
PCI Express 2.0 Support Designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture offering the highest data transfer speeds for the most bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility with existing PCI Express motherboards for the broadest support.
Dual-link DVI Support Able to drive industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays up to 2560x1600 and with support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
HDMI 1.4a Support***** Fully integrated support for HDMI 1.4a including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D4 support, xvYCC, deep color, and 7.1 digital surround sound including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. Upgrade your GPU to full 3D capability with NVIDIA 3DTV Play software, enabling 3D gaming, picture viewing and 3D web video streaming. See www.nvidia.com/3dtv for more details.
Photo Gallery
The packaging looks decent and comes with all the necessary bits to get you started. These include the drivers on CD, instruction manual, a spare PCIe power cable, DVI-to-VGA adaptor and a mini-HDMI to Full-HDMI converter.
A Closer Look
MSI's Cyclone GPU cooler dominates the card and looks extremely good in our test rig. It's fairly large, but not oversize. I like the backplate ... the etched MSI logo looks so good!
Installation
There' no problems with installation whatsoever. The card fitted nicely in our MSI P55A Fuzion motherboard with plenty of room. Only one 6-pin PCIe power cable is required to power the graphics card. It's something I admire because the less cables you use within your system ... the better the air-flow.
To test the Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 Silent Cell (1Gb GDDR5), we used a test rig based on the above components. As you can see, it's a pretty decent system, enough for what we need. Here are some of the benchmark software which we'll be using:
CPU-Z and Everest
PC Mark Vantage
Unigine Heaven (DX11)
Aliens Vs Predator (DX11)
Stone Giant (DX11)
Nvidia Drivers PhysX Configuration
GPU-Z
Everest
3DMark Vantage Default Benchmark - 1280x1024, AA x8, AF x16
Unigine Heaven (DX11) Default Benchmark - 1280x1024, AA x8, AF x16
Aliens vs Predator (DX11) Default Benchmark - 1280x1024
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As predicted, the performance of the Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone is comparable to that of the Radeon HD 5770, which I think is extremely good considering its a mainstream card. This is probably down to the slightly overclocked GPU running at 850Mhz. However, when compared against its bigger brother, the Geforce GTX 460 ... you can really see the performance difference. One has to remember, the Geforce GTS 450 is really aimed and targeted at the mainstream market, with a price that's extremely attractive. During our tests, the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone produced a score of P10742 in our 3DMark Vantage benchmark, which is pretty respectable.
I never really considered how important a GPU cooler can be, but after seeing the high temperatures produced by Radeon based graphic cards ... I'm more aware than ever before. Using the GPU-Z software, we recorded a GPU temperature of around 27 degrees Celsius, during idlle, but peaks to about 33-36 degrees at full load. This is extremely good and confirms that the MSI's Cyclone thermal design does really work!
We haven't been able to do any SLI testing, but you can bet that the performance will be very good. I would be interesting to see how 2 of these cards will compare against a single higher-end card ... such as a Geforce GTX 460/470 or a Radeon HD 5830?
Review sponsored by Hornington
For the mainstream user, the majority of them want a lot of features, decent performance and good price. And this is exactly what the Geforce GTS 450 is all about. It comes with all of the innovative features found on their higher-end GTX models, such as support for 2-way SLI, CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. With MSI's Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone, you get all this plus an overclocked GPU and their Cyclone cooler. Suddenly, the whole package seems a lot more attractive.
Has Nvidia struck gold with theit latest Geforce GTS 450 GPU? I'm not 100% sure. If I was to buy a graphics card, there's one thing I always consider first, and that is ... price. But having said that, you really have to look at the price difference between the GTX 460 and the GTS 450. I mean, if it is only USD $30-40 more ... then I would rather go for the GTX 460.
So what about price? ... Well, this part is the best bit. Current prices range from USD $120-135.00 (GBP 75-85.00), which I think is one of the most affordable graphics cards available on the market, that offers good features and decent performance.
Final words. Overall, the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone a good all rounder with some great features. It offers decent performance that's comparable to the Radeon HD 5770 at a price that's astonshingly attractive. Graphic cards based on Nvidia's Geforce GTS 450, such as the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone will be suited for the mainstream user and occasional gamer. Hardcore gaming enthusiasts will probably give this one a miss.
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