so this video is meant to be a few things first of all it is meant to be a
somewhat of a review of the PNY GeForce gts450 that I did unbox a little while
back okay it is also meant to be a look at SLI performance with the PNY
gts450 as well as the MSI Cyclone GTS
450 now these are both very similar cards I'm going to stop holding up the
box and instead I'm actually going to hold up the PNY card itself now they're
quite similar cards you can actually see now that we have them side by side they
do use the same reference PCB design
okay so the biggest difference is the cooler we did a cooler comparison but
remember these cards will work just fine in SLI mode so that's what we were able
to Benchmark them in so I want you to have a look at my test bench here and
I'm just going to show you what I was using for this particular little video
review I've got a core i7 860 running at
3.8 GHz down there and that is with
hyperthreading on all right I've got uh
4 gigs of Kingston hyperx H2O RAM don't even bother trying to look at that it's
way in the back it looks like this I have a third stick here okay so that's
what that looks like all right then we've got nus motherboard which is both
SLI and Crossfire compatible which was necessary for the testing today and this
is all running off an ocz vertex series SSD all right so let's have a look at
all the cards that we ran with today you can see we've got the GTX 480 in there
as a reference point okay we've got the 58 70 as a reference point as well so
the whole point today was to see how does two mid-range or really value
performance cards like the 450 or the
5770 you can see we've tested with a single as well as with dual 57 70s as
well how does two uh more mid-range
cards compare to a single high-end card from each vendor and then how does the
NVIDIA offering compare to the ATI offering I also threw in the GTX 460
Cyclone Edition because I did have it on hand and it's such a popular card right
now I figured okay well that'll be a good reference point for people as well
so stay tuned I'm going to do boring Benchmark graphs and before then I'm
going to show you all the settings I was using in the games that we did
test one of the games we tested obviously crisis is still a benchmark
for optimal system performance under incredible load if it can run crisis
really well then typically it can run most games fairly well although that is
changing there are some fairly demanding games coming out these days we're
running at 1680 X 1050 which is a perfectly reasonable resolution for our
mainstream level cards but what you'll discover when we show you the graphics
benchmarks The Benchmark numbers is that some of the higher-end cards do start to
get CPU bottlenecked at that resolution and we don't see scaling even with more
impressive graphics cards again once again this is mainstream cards that
we're mostly having a look at so I'm using all of the medium presets for ch
PR here's the settings we used for Mafia 2 but I do want you to note one thing
the Apex physics engine here is off because I do have a Radeon card on the
platform right now but I did run it two separate ways for all the NVIDIA cards I
ran it once with Apex physics on high and then once with it off so the only
time I'm going to compare against Radeon cards is with physx off but it should be
noted that this game does have substantial uh gameplay innov ations
that rely on physx that really you're not getting the ideal experience from
unless you have physx on Batman Arkham Asylum yeah I know this
game's not that new but frankly I don't care I really enjoyed it so I'm going to
go ahead and Benchmark it also it serves as a reference point as uh an unreal
three engine game so that allows us to
find out how these cards will compare against each other in a pretty wide
variety of games so these are the settings that we did use and you can see
once again here I have Hardware accelerated physics off but I had it set
to high with the supported NVIDIA cards
and so what I'll do is I'll show you again two points of comparison one with
physx off with all of the cards in the mix and then one with high with only the
NVIDIA cards
so in conclusion uh that was my second video review and I had so many people
requesting it I couldn't help but do more I guess there's not really too much
to say I mean you've seen the numbers already and really the prices haven't
really haven't settled enough for the GTS 450 series cards to really make a
clear recommendation in terms of FPS per dollar or some kind of a Hardline
measurement but what we can see is that the cards do scale quite well in SLI
they do perform quite well for their price point and if you want to check it
out here I just hope you've all enjoyed this review of the PNY gts450 as well as
the SLI running review I mean I guess
it's uh it's more of a review of both of these cards than only one but I hope
you've enjoyed it and I also wanted to make a special note here in the
conclusion that I totally forgot about before I am running the absolute latest
driver revision for all of these cards so that means the latest 260 download
from the NVIDIA website as well as Catalyst 10.9 for all of the at cards so
these are pretty much the most upto-date numbers that you can get for any of
these cards don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips and I hope you've
enjoyed our video review