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
Overclocking
As we alluded to in the opening of this article, NVIDIA is once again pushing the overclockability of their GPUs. The GF106 GPU at the heart of the GTS 450 is supposed to be about as overclockable as the GF104 GPU instead the GTX 460, and there’s little doubt that this is the case. NVIDIA’s partners are already on the bandwagon, and are offering heavily overclocked cards. Or for the do-it-yourself types, even the average reference card should be quite overclockable as long as you’re willing to take the risk of the periodic dud.
The GTS 450 is already supported by the latest version of MSI’s excellent afterburner software, and keeping with their policy MSI has enabled overvoltage support for all cards using the same VRMs as the reference card. So we were able to overvolt all of our reference cards and our factory overclocked cards. The VRMs on all of the cards except the Asus card top out at 1.162v, however for safety reasons (and the fact that the VRMs aren’t even passively cooled) we limited ourselves to 1.15v.
As not all of our cards are exactly alike, we’ll quickly run down the differences between the various cards
- 2x NVIDIA GTS 450 Reference
- 1x Calibre X450G. Reference PCB, aftermarker cooler, factory overclocked
- 1x EVGA GTS 450 FTW. Reference PCB, reference cooler, factory overclocked
- 1x Asus ENGTS450 TOP. Reference-derived PCB, custom cooler, factory overclocked
- 1x Palit GeForce GTS 450 Sonic Platinum. Custom PCB, custom cooler, factory overclocked
Overclocking Results | ||||||
Stock Clock | Max Overclock | Stock Voltage | Overclocked Voltage | |||
GTS 450 Reference #1 | 783MHz | 955MHz | 1.05v | 1.115v | ||
GTS 450 Reference #2 | 783MHz | 930MHz | 1.062v | 1.115v | ||
Asus ENGTS450 Top | 925MHz | 985MHz | 1.125v | 1.115v | ||
EVGA GTS 450 FTW | 920MHz | 955MHz | 1.112v | 1.115v | ||
Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum | 930MHz | 985MHz | 1.087v | 1.115v | ||
Sparkle Calibre X450G | 850MHz | 935MHz | 1.087v | 1.115v |
Unlike the GTX 460 launch where the vendor cards we had all came with a mild factory overclock, for the GTS 450 launch all of our cards have a significant factory overclock. 3 of the 4 are at 920MHz or better, which is a 137MHz (17%) overclock over reference speeds.
Even with voltage tweaking capabilities there was a very noticeable range in the overclockability of our cards. The worst card was one of the reference cards, which only hit 930MHz even at 1.15v. The best cards were the Asus and Palit cards at 985MHz. This puts the average overclock at just over 955MHz, which isn’t too far off from the factory overclocks already on some of these cards.
Meanwhile 4.2GHz seems to be the wall for memory overclocking. The GTS 450 is only equipped with 4GHZ GDDR5, so this may not be a fantastic outcome but it is realistic.
Because our maximum overclocks weren’t too much higher than the factory overclocks on some of these cards, there aren’t many surprises to be had when it comes to overclocking. With a solid overclock you can beat the 5770 most of the time, but it’s not enough to get much higher than that.
Overclocking (or rather overvolting) has the usual outcome when we look at power, temperature, and noise. The extra power enables extra performance, but it completely blows the performance-per-watt of the GTS 450 cards. Temperature and noise levels rise, but both are actually still quite manageable even at 1.15v. The only things holding the GPU back are the VRMs feeding it, and the innate limits of what the GPU can reach. Given this, it makes little sense not to overclock as long as you have a card with a suitable limit.
Finally, as a testament to how poorly a pair of GTS 450s in SLI get along with each other when they’re right next to each other, we weren’t able to get away with overvolting them at all. Even at 1.1v, the covered card would ultimately reach a thermal runaway under FurMark – the fan would max out and the temperature would start climbing in to the 90s. This shouldn’t be an issue with cards that are separated, but overclocking is definitely not on the menu when they’re packed together.
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just4U - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
overclockers is the only review I've seen that shows the 250 in the mix and by the looks of it the 450 is a good 25-30% faster then the 250 on most games they tested with... what reviews are you reading?Personally I see no reason to rush out and buy two of these. A 460 is cheaper and to close in performance to justify it.
marraco - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gts-45...KG Bird - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Nice review, but answer one question for me. Why does the HD 5770 scale well in crossfire while others like the HD 5870 don't?heflys - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
That's one of the great mysteries that has plagued the Crossfire setup. Might just be crappy drivers. Who knows.....Jedi2155 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Do it right...and do it right the first time is the name of the game.OCNewbie - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Why would they compare a GTS 450 overclocked to a stock 5770? Wouldn't it make more sense to compare apples to apples, or in this case, OC'd versus OC'd? If you're gonna OC the GTS 450, then wouldn't it be reasonable to expect you'd also OC the 5770? Doesn't the 5770 OC quite well? This is probably even less of a debate, as far as which is the best performer, if you factor in OC'ng to BOTH cards.jabber - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
Most 5770 cards go up to 900/1300 pretty easy.Would leave the 450 even further in the dust however.
Belard - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Looks like AMD still has a solid product line of DX11 parts. So an end-user would still be looking at the older 210~250 cards for the $40~80 market.AMD could still easily reduce their prices across the board... but guess they're going to wait until the 6000 series ships and them blow out the 5000 series for cheap.
If the 6750 comes out at $120, but good deal faster than the 5770, that is going to hurt.
KingKuei - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
So what happened to the Release 260 drivers we were supposed to get this morning?Anand mentioned something about a bug in the driver related to OpenGL (or was it CUDA?) that they were going to fix before releasing it. Yet it's already late afternoon Monday and there's nothing on nVidia's site yet.
The big deal for me actually is related to SC2. SUPPOSEDLY, this is the driver release that fixes many of the issues related to framerate drops in SC2. I care more about that than the GTS 450!
Spazweasel - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
One thing to note: there is a low-profile (double slot) version of this card already available from Palit. I can't find a low-profile 5770. For low-profile cases, this is therefore likely the best you can currently get, and given it's a low-thermal-impact part, this makes sense.The ball is in your court, Powercolor/Sparkle!