GeForce GTS 450 SLI review - Introduction

GeForce GTS 450 1024MB SLI gets tested

The release of the GeForce GTS 450 is interesting in the sense it (in a few weeks time) will become a very cheap product. A month from now we expect the baseline cards to drop to roughly 100 maybe 110 EUR, and with 192 Shader processors per card and NVIDIAs excellent SLI scaling it just might be well worth to check out going multi-GPU with a SLI setup.

See doubling up to two cards gives you 384 Shader processor and two 1024MB memory partitions. For a card that is marketed as 1600x1200 card things now change, if you like to game up-top say 1920x1200 and stick to 4xAA or 8xAA then SLI might be a superb treat in terms of value for money.

Multi-GPU gaming has become popular over the past few year thanks mostly to NVIDIA's SLI solutions initially, and obviously later on ATI Crossfire joined that path as well. So we take two GeForce GTS 450 cards and place them into SLI mode. But also we'll throw in a combo of two Radeon HD 5770 cards setup in CrossfireX, we feel it is the real direct competitor to GTS 450 in both price and performance. Both armed with the very latest drivers, patches and games.

This article will cover SLI performance among the new GTS 450 cards with 1024MB in several games, we look at performance scaling and also we'll check ATI versus NVIDIA with the R5770, to see what is the best solution. Not just that, we'll also look at temperatures, power consumption, noise levels and sure, we'll overclock the SLI setup as well.

Over the next few pages we'll tell you a bit about multi-GPU gaming, the challenges, the requirements and of course a nice tasty benchmark session. Have a peek at the coolness in the photo below and then let's startup this article.