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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Hrel - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 - link
Hi, can you please get this card put in bench. I know you're updating soon, but I'd love it if you could just add this one last card to the current configuration. And then not toss it when the test bed gets updated, just label it by the date, as the old version. This would be very very helpful, thank you!Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - link
I'm working on Bench right now in fact. it will be in there later this morning.Casper42 - Wednesday, September 15, 2010 - link
You guys really need to stop insisting the GTX 480 is a $500 card.The one your Pricing table links to is some crazy beast of a card that is now the exception rather than the rule.
NewEgg has over 10 cards for under $500 and only 4 above $500.
Including Rebates the average price comes down to at least $470 if not cheaper.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 16, 2010 - link
In this case $500 is NVIDIA's official MSRP. That's right off their price chart from late last week.DJ-Destiny - Friday, October 1, 2010 - link
Okay , so that "ring-choke" thing ,isn't quite a ring-choke .
It's an solid core inductor .
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
"The extra power enables extra performance, but it completely blows the performance-per-watt of the GTS 450 cards.""Given this, it makes little sense not to overclock as long as you have a card with a suitable limit."
If one wants more performance, and more performance per watt, perhaps buying one of these to overlock isn't so sensible?