GeForce GTS 450 review roundup - NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 REFERENCE

NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 REFERENCE

Here's where we start off the photo gallery showing you all cards tested today, and we do have quite a lot of them. No less than ten cards will be covered in today's article. We'll handle them in alphabetical order yet start off with the NVIDIA reference cards.

So there it is, the GTS 450. We have two reference cards in-house as in a separate article we'll handle SLI performance as well. Overall a familiar looking design, resembling GeForce GTX 460 a lot actually.

Most reference design based cards will come with two digital DVI and a mini-HDMI connector. Board partners however are free to use whatever connectivity they want. Especially in the custom design card segment we'll see a lot of variation. The dual-slot cooler is really silent, in fact you cannot hear it even if you tried to.

All GeForce GTS 450 cards come with one 6-pin PEG power connector that feeds the card 75 Watts, and another 75 Watts is supplied through the PCIe slot. With a TDP of just over 100 Watts this is more than sufficient.

What you'll notice today is that pretty much all cards use Samsung memory, rated 0.4 and 0.5ns. NVIDIA's reference design allows for a clock of 3600 (divided by four / quad data-rate = 900 MHz). The ICs however are all pretty much rated 0.5ns or 0.4ns. If we take the 0.4ns ICs, then in theory we should be able to reach 5000 MHz on the memory and 4000 MHz on 5ns memory (effective data rates).

Anyway, we'll have a peek at that in our overclock session. Let's move onwards to the AIB partner products, we'll show them in alphabetical order, starting thus with ASUS.