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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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!