Introduction

Graphic cards based on Nvidia's recently launched Geforce GTS 450 are coming in thick and fast. Earlier this week we reviewed the MSI N450GTS OC Edition, which featured an overclocked GPU @ 850Mhz and MSI's special Cyclone GPU cooler. We thought it was a good all rounder that offered decent performance for a good price. As more and more manufacturers release their own Geforce GTS 450 cards, we will be seeing many different versions on the market. Some will offer overclocked GPUs, while others will come the extra goodies such as custom cooling or even bundled games.

The mainstream market is massive, and there's only one thing that matters most for users ... and that is cost and price. So, what Nvidia has done, is to anwser the wishes of the mainstream users who want decent performance, great features and a good price. Not asking a lot are we? ... Well, with Nvidia's Geforce GTS 450, you get all the innovative features found on their higher-end GTX cards, but at a much lower price. However, to reduce costs you'll get a lower-spec memory interface of 128-bit and a reduction in the number of processing cores.

Zotac (the company) is what you would refer to as a 1st-Tier manufacturer. They've been one of Nvidia's graphic board and launch partners for many years, and the two work very closely with each other. So it's only natural for Zotac, to be among the first to release new graphic cards that feature Nvidia's new GPUs. In fact, Zotac have been very busy lately ... not only are they releasing new graphic cards, but also mini PCs and nettops that uses Nvidia's ION graphics platform/chipset. For those who are not familiar with Zotac or their products, here's something taken from their website ...

Today we take a look at the Zotac Geforce GTS 450. This version is more or less based on Nvidia's reference design, with one difference ... like the MSI N450GTS OC Edition, it features a GPU that's slightly overclocked @ 810Mhz (default is 783Mhz). It uses the same 128-bit memory interface and comes with 1Gb of GDDR5 ram, which runs at an effective speed of 1804 MHz (2 x 902Mhz). As I've described before, the Geforce GTS 450 GPU offers all of the innovative features found on 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.

Since the Zotac Geforce GTS 450 uses a design that is very similar to Nvidia's reference board, there's no special cooler nor are there any custom overclocking software included. I would have liked Zotac to have included something unique with this card, but I guess they reserve that for their better performing overclocked AMP! series.

It will be interesting to see how well this card will perform against other in its class. We already know from our previous review of the MSI N450GTS, that the overall performance is comparable to that of the Radeon HD 5770. What I'm more interested in ... is how much of a difference, in terms of performance can a slightly higher overclocked GPU make? MSI's 850Mhz vs Zotac's 810Mhz.

We'll be testing the Zotac Geforce GTS 450 (1Gb GDDR5) on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), Gigabyte P55 USB3 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.

Right, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications and features of the Zotac Geforce GTS 450 (1Gb GDDR5) ...

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