NVIDIA’s GeForce GTS 450: Pushing Fermi In To The Mainstream
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2010 12:02 AM EST- Posted in
- NVIDIA
- Fermi
- GeForce GTS 450
- GF106
- GPUs
The Test
For today’s launch, we’re looking at the NVIDIA reference card along with samples from Asus, Palit, EVGA, and Sparkle (under their Calibre brand). For the sake of brevity we’ve split off our in-depth look at those cards in to a companion article, but we’re still including them in the charts for this GTS 450 review. 3 of these cards are overclocked to around 920MHz, so this provides a good idea of where the performance of top overclocked cards will lie.
Since NVIDIA gave us a pair of reference cards, we’re also looking a SLI performance. As GTS 450 is a mainstream card we consider buying a larger card to be a better solution than SLIing lesser cards (unless you need surround vision, at least) but this is something to consider if you have an SLI-capable motherboard and may add a second card in the future.
We’ve also added a 9800 GTX to the mix to showcase G92 performance, as we don’t have a GTS 250 available. It shouldn’t be used as a proxy as GTS 250 cards are clocked higher and most have additional RAM, but it offers a glimpse of where GTS 450 stands compared to G92 based cards.
Finally, we’re using the latest AMD Catalyst drivers for our Radeon HD 5700 series benchmarks: 10.8b.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5830 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 5750 AMD Radeon HD 4890 AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4850 AMD Radeon HD 3870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Asus ENGTS450 Top Palit GeForce GTS 450 Sonic Platinum EVGA GeForce GTS 450 FTW Sparkle Calibre X450G |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 197.13 NVIDIA ForceWare 257.15 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 258.80 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 260.52 Beta AMD Catalyst 10.3a AMD Catalyst 10.8b |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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lecaf - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Oh my wrong I missed the SLI partsorry
:)
mino - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
That "SLI" detail ... :)jabber - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Buy a 5770 and OC it to 900/1300 like most should out of the box.Sorted.
Quidam67 - Saturday, September 18, 2010 - link
Agreed. The article repeatedly pointed out that an overclocked 450 catches up to a 5770, but never mentions that the 5770 generally overclocks very well so is likely to take back the lead anyway.Zokudu - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
But it goes without saying that modern video drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA ridiculously huge, and this new installer doesn’t do anything to change that.I think your missing an are there. Otherwise wonderful article guys.
Lonyo - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Well, that whole bit isn't entirely accurate anyway. The NV drivers are more than 2x the size of AMD drivers, and AMD drivers aren't that much bigger than the drivers for more "mundane" things like ever printers and sound cards.Either way it's not entirely relevant at all.
iwodo - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Well Nv Drivers includes a lot more then ATI, otherwise they are about the same.But would Anandtech go on to find out just why Drivers Size is so huge. I have the feeling if the drivers were specifically written for one generation of graphics card it would save huge amount of space.
Taft12 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
I agree that there is probably a ton of code in there to support cards all the way back to 6xxx but also that this would lead to a support nightmare for users that don't know what model is in their PC.Too bad, but it's the nature of the industry and graphics tech is the fastest moving of them all.
Ryan Smith - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Actually we did something a bit like that early last year for the NV drivers.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3510
At the time the PhysX package was around 40% of the required space.
On modern drivers the languages have a lot to do with it. The NV International drivers are a good 30MB bigger than the English-only drivers.
heflys - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
This card is such a disappointment. It performs worse than the year old card 5770, and only surpasses it when overclocked; it's also about the same price. Furthermore, in some reviews, the 5770 even beats it in Crossfire vs SLI comparison! To add further insult to injury, AMD is about to launch new cards shortly!This card has to be priced at $110-120 to be competitive in my book.