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 |
66 Comments
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kallogan - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
"Furthermore our pre-release version of Badaboom with Fermi support doesn’t work either, so that also was dropped"I knew you had a special version of badaboom for your GTX 400s reviews ;)
tviceman - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Great job on the article. Well written, well informed. But man, you guys really need to update your benchmark suite. I think Wolfenstein sold maybe about a two dozen copies on PC. Metro2033 now has an excellent built-in benchmark buried within it's directories. L4D2 is a more demanding, and more played game, than L4D1.Since we're entering the DX11 era, incorporating as many DX11 games as possible would make sense.
Taft12 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Agreed, there are a number of titles that even low-end cards can play comfortably. Consider those "case closed"Ryan said the benchmark selections are being updated in the fall, so bring on the SC2!!!
juampavalverde - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
240mm2 for this kind of performance and power consumption? laaaaameGoty - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
So they STILL have yet to release a full Fermi-derived chip? How long has it been, now? That's just sad.loeakaodas - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Did AMD release a new card or is that a mistype?"Cheese Slices: Radeon HD 5760 Deinterlacing" on the 3rd page.
Etern205 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
In the article, the 3-4 paragraph (quote)"entering the world as a 192 CUDA core part but with 3 sets of memory controllers and ROPs, for a combined total of a 192bit memory bus,..."
It was mentioned the card has a 192bit memory bus, but on the chart it says it's has 192 CUDA cores with a 128bit memory bus. So which is correct?
Etern205 - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
nevermind :)Conficio - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Cheese Slices: Radeon HD 5760 Deinterlacingvs
When compared to the Radeon HD 5670, the GTS
thedeffox - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
Over twenty different configurations, and you didn't include the card it's supposed to replace? Really?It seems a rather obvious card to include. More relevant than cards far outside its price bracket.