as you can see that is a video card on the test bench that is the brand
spanking new gForce GTS 450 from NVIDIA
this is the Cyclone OC that is overclocked Edition from MSI it has 1
gig of RAM so you can see I have the box for it here along with a couple cards
that I'm going to be comparing it against today so first of all we want to
compare it against the GTX 460 so you can see I have a Cyclone OC 1 gig card
from MSI for that comparison Point here's the box for the GTS 450 which is
the one on the test bench right now and because it's one of the closest price
competitors on the ATI side although uh slightly more expensive at launch the
5770 uh will also be included in the comparison today we're just going to run
some simple numbers and yeah let's see how it goes both from
a performance standpoint as well as from a there's my energy meter power
consumption standpoint the test platform why don't we go through that really
quick you can see I have like ghetto plastic in between these to keep them
from touching it's because I left my test bench um and I don't really have
one to use at the moment but that's neither here nor there we have a 4.15
GHz core i7 980x under a cooler here we
have 12 gigs of ocz special edition DDR3
RAM a big bang X power MSI Motherboard
and we have a 90 plus% efficient fanless
power supply actually running the whole thing so that's going to give us a
really good idea of how much power is actually being drawn the hard drive is
going to be an ocz vertex Le 200 gig
drive and I guess that pretty much covers the test platform all right well
our Vantage run is complete so you can see the GTS 450 scored
11,431 3D marks with 9,200 of those
almost 9,300 being on the GPU score now
I want to just point something out this
Benchmark is not particularly useful for comparing the 450 to the
5770 but when you're looking at two cards within the same architecture
family so these are both firmy based
derivatives okay so if we compare it against the 460 it on the same platform
it should give us at least a a fairly
good indication of how the power these cards compares to each other speaking of
power the 450 maxed out at 337 wats
during our Vantage test so let's bear that number in mind for
later next Benchmark is Crisis so this is running at uh 10 oh 1680 by 1050
that's the word I was looking for it is running at you can see our last run was
uh 61 frames per second that was the first run out of the bench though so
usually that one goes a little bit slow lower so you can see the average FPS for
this particular run through is about 66 frames per second like I said I'm
running at 1680 by 1050 uh there you go 65.5 five is what
it scored on that one I am running with all details medium because really we're
looking at cards that are in the 149 sort of price range for the most part I
mean this one goes up to around $2.49 but uh you can't really expect at almost
HD resolution to be you know turning up
the details to Max unless you're starting to invest in more expensive
cards like for example over here we've got a 460 lightning and we've got a GTX
480 I mean if you're an Enthusiast you want to run at HD Plus resolutions all
high details anti-aliasing Etc speaking of which I'm not using anti-aliasing
those over there are going to be the cards for you but you can see the GTS
450 does post very respectable numbers
and I mean crisis at medium still looks great so that is how that went okay the
ma 2 run is going to be a little bit different first of all I want you to
know that the in-game Benchmark does not actually present a a very accurate real
world scenario it runs quite a bit slower than you'd actually uh expect
from the game in the real world so here are all the settings I'm running and of
note is the fact that again antialiasing is off it's a high-end game it's a
mid-range graphics card antialiasing does not provide in my opinion enough of
a gameplay benefit to sacrifice things like Shadows
and other details for it okay and I have
turned physics on because unlike the other titles we've been looking at Mafia
2 is all about the physx support if you have an NVIDIA card you better be
running it with physx on because that's how you're going to get the best gameplay experience all right we're just
finishing up the Benchmark run here you can see we've got an average of 33
frames per second so that's a little bit on the low side of what I would consider
playable but yeah it gives us a point of comparison against the other cards that
we are going to be looking at today so here you go the performance is not
optimal rank d as I mentioned before the actual in-game Benchmark is a little bit
on the slower side compared to what you would experience uh playing the game all
right these are my Arkham Asylum options in the control panel this is another
NVIDIA uh physics ready game so I've gone ahead and left Hardware accelerated
physics on it's set to normal because we don't I mean they recommend really a
dedicated physics card for the high setting vsync is off everything else is
as you see here Batman Arkham Asylum ready to
run doing one more run of Mafia 2 One
Small Change Is that the Apex physics are set to medium because I am not
running with GPU physics anymore I just wanted to do an Apples to Apples
comparison against the 5770 just so that
we uh have one more point of reference here
it really is plain to see that this game is not nearly as cool without the
physics on high I just thought I'd uh do a quick clip here just to say my
thoughts on it with the with the physics on medium running on the CPU uh you know
the outdoor scene in particular you can't really notice it much in here but
uh not nearly as many part persistent particles not nearly as much damage and
things like the building um just way way
less interesting to to
watch so besides the lon Stellar uh
physics performance with it on medium running on the CPU the frame rate was
quite a bit
lower so in conclusion I give it about a C+ uh that is my video review not the
card itself I think I might just stick to the whole unboxings product showcases
uh gameplay videos simpler things like that because stringing together a
complete review seems to be too complicated for me for whatever reason
but anyway let's talk a little bit about the conclusions about this card first of
all this is the Cyclone cooler card I'm going to have some separate videos
coming up in the next little while where I'm going to show some overclocking numbers I'm going to show uh some
acoustic numbers well not really numbers but some acoustic characteristics of it
because really the test test bench I had was far too loud for you to appreciate
how quiet the card is so I have to put together a silent test bench so I can
kind of do my whole here I'm going to hold the camera close to the card you
can see how quiet it is thing so that should be fine as far as the performance
versus the price goes uh power consumption is slightly improved over
the 460 series card and the price to
Performance ratio still looks quite good now it's not quite a 5770 or 5750 killer
but I mean knowing NVIDIA we're going to see MIRS from their Partners we're going
to probably see some IRS come into effect and I think that it will become a
very very strong Contender especially when you consider that it has features
that you don't necessarily find on competing products I mean Mafia 2 is a
great example of a game that you really can enjoy on a GTS 450 I mean yeah not
to the same level as with a 460 but you can have a good experience with it at
sub HD resolutions and with physx you
really do get a better gameplay experience so I mean that's something to
really bear in mind about a card like this thank you for checking out my I
guess first attempt at a real video review and don't forget to subscribe to
lonus Tech tips that was pretty much it
oh no one more thing yes if you want to get the best performance possible don't
forget use the latest version of After Burner from MSI uh 2.0 that will give
you all of the voltage adjustments that you can do on this card and also use the
latest drivers from NVIDIA their new 260 series drivers that'll give you better
performance on this as well as many other fmy base cards