since I first heard about the GTS 450 I thought it would be interesting to test
this card because it is coming in at around a $100 price point I wanted to
test it as a dedicated FX card so you
can see I've got it configured here right now with the GTX 480 and then the
GTS 450 because this is for fizx and not
for SLI there's no need to install any SLI Bridges or anything like that and I
am using a motherboard that has two PCI E6 16x slots so that's all you really
need for FX now when you want to configure a dedicated FX card all you do
is go into the NVIDIA control panel okay so you go into set physx configuration
and then you select your physx processor so Auto Select would probably select the
450 but I've gone ahead and selected the 450 anyway you can see the other options
would be to run physx on the 480 run it on the CPU which is
slow or run it on the 450 so then all you do is Click apply and that's all
there is to it so you can see here it
says yeah FX is running here and then the display is running here so that's
fairly straightforward so what I'm going to do is I'll uh do up a little graph
with some Benchmark results this is the same test bench I used for my GTS 450
review as well as my gts450 uh SLI
review well review and uh so I'm just
going to go ahead and compare the 480 numbers I got without a dedicated physx
card so while I was running physx on the on the 480 itself with adding the 450 to
take a little bit of the load off
it well I think based on the numbers the conclusion for this video is quite
simple because you can see that a GTX 480 is a little over $500 after rebate
on the ncx site and then a GTS
450 is going to run you about
$129.99 so you're adding about 25% more
cost to your setup by adding a GTS 450
on top of the GTX 480 that in theory you already
own but you also get about on average a
24.5% Improvement in performance so it's
not actually very often on premium parts that you can pay an extra dollar to get
an extra proportional amount of performance like usually see a point of
diminishing returns where you're spending you know twice as much but
you're only getting you know 1.5 times the amount of performance so it's
actually a pretty good value from that perspective but the drawback is that out
of all of the games that I have here on my Steam
account I only have like two that support fizx so it's one of those
situations where yes as a best case scenario a dedicated GTS 450 looks like
a great value if you play games that are going to take advantage of it but if you
don't play physx enabled games then you'd probably be better off saving your
pennies to grab another 480 to run an SLI or finding some other way to
increase the performance of your system so thanks for checking out my little
mini review on using the GTS 450 as a
dedicated physx processor