Article Index Review: MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone (N450GTS) Specifications and Features Photo Gallery and A Closer Look Installation and Test Setup GPU-Z and Everest 3DMark Vantage and Unigine Heaven DX11 AvP and Stone Giant DX11 Verdict and Conclusion

Introduction

On Monday, Nvidia released their latest Geforce GTS 450 GPU. It's mainly aimed at the mainstream market, and should appeal to many users including the occasional gamer and your average SOHO user. But there's one thing which I find interesting ... Nvidia claims that their lastest Geforce GTS 450 offers killer performance at a sweet price. But is this really true? We've already looked at their Geforce GTX 460 last month, and we believe it's currently the best graphics card available on the market in terms of both performance and price. Can their new Geforce GTS 450 GPU do any better?

We always hear about products for high-end and enthusiast markets, but the truth is ... it's a very niche market and amount to only a tiny percent in sales for most manufacturers. The real profits are in the massive mainstream market, and this is where fierce battles and competition takes place ... just to capture some of this market share. For Nvidia to release their Geforce GTS 450 GPU in the 4th quarter of 2010, is a well planned strategy ... why? Because AMD is about to release their next Radeon HD 6xxx series of graphics cards code-named "Cayman". So in order to phase out any inventory that Nvidia may have ... now is the time to do it. Once done, Nvidia can then concentrate on their next Geforce series.

Looking at the specifications of the Geforce GTS 450 GPU, it offers all of the innovative features of their higher-end GTX models, such as support for 2-way SLI, CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. It looks like Nvidia may have answered the calls of the mainstream gamers ... to produce a graphics card that offers decent performance at good price. However, there are some important aspects of the Geforce GTS 450, which is why it's classed as a mainstream product. These include the fact that it uses a lower number of processing cores and memory interface of 128-bit.  Take a look at the comparison table below, between a GTX 460 and the newly released GTS 450.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone (N450GTS). It features an overclocked GPU which runs at 850Mhz (default is 783Mhz), and comes with 1Gb of GDDR5 ram clocked slightly higher at 2000Mhz. It uses a 128-bit memory interface, and has a total of 192 procesing cores (as described in the table above). Furthermore, MSI have also included their Afterburner overclocking utility, which is an added bonus for anyone who wishes to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the Geforce GTS 450.

For cooling, MSI have included their own in-house designed GPU cooler, which they claim can offer upto 17℃ lower in termperature over reference designs. This Cyclone GPU cooler  features a Nickel-plated copper base for better dissipation, as well as a rounded design for dust free operation. It certainly looks very impressive, but it perform as good as it looks?

Since this is a mainstream graphics card, I will not be expecting eye-popping performance that will beat the higher-end cards. However, I am expecting the card to cope with all of our DX11 tests, and I'm hoping it will produce some respectable scores  at least. It will be interesting to see how well, MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone will compare against the Radeon HD 5770 and its bigger brother, the Geforce GTX 460.

We'll be testing the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), MSI P55A Fuzion motherboard, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer, Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler and a Silverpower 650w power supply. All-in-all, a decently spec'd computer system.

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the MSI Geforce GTS 450 Cyclone OC Edition with 1Gb GDDR5 ...

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