GeForce GTS 450 review roundup - Introduction

'Extra Extra Read all about it', come on people, learn about the new GeForce GTS 450, we've got ASUS, eVGA, ECS, MSI, NVIDIA, Palit, Sparkle, KFA2 (Galaxy), Inno3D and Gigabyte covered all in this exclusive article.

Hey you know, I was checking up some information on the release of the budget oriented GeForce GTS 450 today. A new lower level mid-range product that is targeted against the Radeon HD 5750. Performance and features wise pretty much the very same products except for PhysX and 3D Surround vision. And while comparing specifications I realized how long it actually has taken NVIDIA to release the mid-range DX11 class products. Get this, our first R5770/5750 reviews date from October 2009 -- yeah, last year.

So, 11 months after the competition released their DX11 class mid-range products, NVIDIA finally inserts a SKU into the market with roughly the same performance. Man, that's arriving late to the market alright.

Either way, at roughly 120 EUR, NVIDIA today releases the GeForce GTS 450. A cute mid-range graphics card armed with DirectX 11 compatibility that comes with one full gigabyte of graphics memory. The product is targeted at gamers with a set budget in mind. Decent performance at a reasonable price. NVIDIA themselves find this card ideal for gamers who play their games with a monitor up-to a resolution of roughly 1600x1200, and that's a fair suggestion in this price range. Competition wise, NVIDIA feels the Radeon HD 5750 is the card to beat.

The card, as rumored for weeks, indeed comes with 192 shader processors, 1 GB of quad data rate GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit wide interface. A card that is clocked at 783/1566/900 MHz (core/shader/memory) with a maximum power draw of a bright light bulb, 106W.

Below, an overview of the products tested today. We'll have a look at reference performance, but obviously a handful of NVIDIA's board partners also submitted their cards for a review. Pretty much all of them come pre-overclocked and/or have some custom cooling applied.

The cards tested today are:

• ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCu TOP
• ECS GTX 450 Black
• eVGA GTS 450 FTW
• Gigabyte GTS 450 OC
• Inno3D GTS 450 Freezer
• KFA2 GTS 450 LTD OC
• MSI N450GTS Cyclone
• NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 reference
• Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum
• Sparkle Calibre X450G

Have a peek of what that looks like, and then let's head onward to the next page please where we'll first dive into the GPU architecture.