PNY & MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB SLI Video Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,115 words · ~5 min read
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so this video is meant to be a few things first of all it is meant to be a
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somewhat of a review of the PNY GeForce gts450 that I did unbox a little while
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back okay it is also meant to be a look at SLI performance with the PNY
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gts450 as well as the MSI Cyclone GTS
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450 now these are both very similar cards I'm going to stop holding up the
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box and instead I'm actually going to hold up the PNY card itself now they're
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quite similar cards you can actually see now that we have them side by side they
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do use the same reference PCB design
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okay so the biggest difference is the cooler we did a cooler comparison but
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remember these cards will work just fine in SLI mode so that's what we were able
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to Benchmark them in so I want you to have a look at my test bench here and
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I'm just going to show you what I was using for this particular little video
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review I've got a core i7 860 running at
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3.8 GHz down there and that is with
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hyperthreading on all right I've got uh
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4 gigs of Kingston hyperx H2O RAM don't even bother trying to look at that it's
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way in the back it looks like this I have a third stick here okay so that's
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what that looks like all right then we've got nus motherboard which is both
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SLI and Crossfire compatible which was necessary for the testing today and this
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is all running off an ocz vertex series SSD all right so let's have a look at
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all the cards that we ran with today you can see we've got the GTX 480 in there
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as a reference point okay we've got the 58 70 as a reference point as well so
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the whole point today was to see how does two mid-range or really value
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performance cards like the 450 or the
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5770 you can see we've tested with a single as well as with dual 57 70s as
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well how does two uh more mid-range
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cards compare to a single high-end card from each vendor and then how does the
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NVIDIA offering compare to the ATI offering I also threw in the GTX 460
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Cyclone Edition because I did have it on hand and it's such a popular card right
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now I figured okay well that'll be a good reference point for people as well
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so stay tuned I'm going to do boring Benchmark graphs and before then I'm
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going to show you all the settings I was using in the games that we did
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test one of the games we tested obviously crisis is still a benchmark
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for optimal system performance under incredible load if it can run crisis
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really well then typically it can run most games fairly well although that is
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changing there are some fairly demanding games coming out these days we're
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running at 1680 X 1050 which is a perfectly reasonable resolution for our
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mainstream level cards but what you'll discover when we show you the graphics
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benchmarks The Benchmark numbers is that some of the higher-end cards do start to
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get CPU bottlenecked at that resolution and we don't see scaling even with more
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impressive graphics cards again once again this is mainstream cards that
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we're mostly having a look at so I'm using all of the medium presets for ch
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PR here's the settings we used for Mafia 2 but I do want you to note one thing
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the Apex physics engine here is off because I do have a Radeon card on the
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platform right now but I did run it two separate ways for all the NVIDIA cards I
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ran it once with Apex physics on high and then once with it off so the only
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time I'm going to compare against Radeon cards is with physx off but it should be
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noted that this game does have substantial uh gameplay innov ations
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that rely on physx that really you're not getting the ideal experience from
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unless you have physx on Batman Arkham Asylum yeah I know this
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game's not that new but frankly I don't care I really enjoyed it so I'm going to
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go ahead and Benchmark it also it serves as a reference point as uh an unreal
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three engine game so that allows us to
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find out how these cards will compare against each other in a pretty wide
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variety of games so these are the settings that we did use and you can see
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once again here I have Hardware accelerated physics off but I had it set
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to high with the supported NVIDIA cards
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and so what I'll do is I'll show you again two points of comparison one with
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physx off with all of the cards in the mix and then one with high with only the
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NVIDIA cards
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so in conclusion uh that was my second video review and I had so many people
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requesting it I couldn't help but do more I guess there's not really too much
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to say I mean you've seen the numbers already and really the prices haven't
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really haven't settled enough for the GTS 450 series cards to really make a
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clear recommendation in terms of FPS per dollar or some kind of a Hardline
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measurement but what we can see is that the cards do scale quite well in SLI
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they do perform quite well for their price point and if you want to check it
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out here I just hope you've all enjoyed this review of the PNY gts450 as well as
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the SLI running review I mean I guess
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it's uh it's more of a review of both of these cards than only one but I hope
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you've enjoyed it and I also wanted to make a special note here in the
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conclusion that I totally forgot about before I am running the absolute latest
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driver revision for all of these cards so that means the latest 260 download
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from the NVIDIA website as well as Catalyst 10.9 for all of the at cards so
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these are pretty much the most upto-date numbers that you can get for any of
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these cards don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips and I hope you've
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enjoyed our video review