PNY NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Dedicated PhysX Card Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
591 words · ~2 min read
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since I first heard about the GTS 450 I thought it would be interesting to test
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this card because it is coming in at around a $100 price point I wanted to
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test it as a dedicated FX card so you
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can see I've got it configured here right now with the GTX 480 and then the
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GTS 450 because this is for fizx and not
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for SLI there's no need to install any SLI Bridges or anything like that and I
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am using a motherboard that has two PCI E6 16x slots so that's all you really
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need for FX now when you want to configure a dedicated FX card all you do
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is go into the NVIDIA control panel okay so you go into set physx configuration
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and then you select your physx processor so Auto Select would probably select the
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450 but I've gone ahead and selected the 450 anyway you can see the other options
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would be to run physx on the 480 run it on the CPU which is
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slow or run it on the 450 so then all you do is Click apply and that's all
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there is to it so you can see here it
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says yeah FX is running here and then the display is running here so that's
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fairly straightforward so what I'm going to do is I'll uh do up a little graph
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with some Benchmark results this is the same test bench I used for my GTS 450
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review as well as my gts450 uh SLI
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review well review and uh so I'm just
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going to go ahead and compare the 480 numbers I got without a dedicated physx
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card so while I was running physx on the on the 480 itself with adding the 450 to
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take a little bit of the load off
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it well I think based on the numbers the conclusion for this video is quite
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simple because you can see that a GTX 480 is a little over $500 after rebate
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on the ncx site and then a GTS
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450 is going to run you about
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$129.99 so you're adding about 25% more
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cost to your setup by adding a GTS 450
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on top of the GTX 480 that in theory you already
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own but you also get about on average a
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24.5% Improvement in performance so it's
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not actually very often on premium parts that you can pay an extra dollar to get
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an extra proportional amount of performance like usually see a point of
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diminishing returns where you're spending you know twice as much but
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you're only getting you know 1.5 times the amount of performance so it's
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actually a pretty good value from that perspective but the drawback is that out
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of all of the games that I have here on my Steam
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account I only have like two that support fizx so it's one of those
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situations where yes as a best case scenario a dedicated GTS 450 looks like
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a great value if you play games that are going to take advantage of it but if you
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don't play physx enabled games then you'd probably be better off saving your
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pennies to grab another 480 to run an SLI or finding some other way to
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increase the performance of your system so thanks for checking out my little
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mini review on using the GTS 450 as a
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dedicated physx processor