NVIDIA have admittedly had some troubles with their Fermi architecture for quite a while; from the initial slightly underwhelming GTX480, to the more recent (and much more impressive) GTX460.
Today brings an announcement of the latest card in the family, the GTS450, which is the sixth Fermi card in the series and by all accounts, the slowest thus far.
However with this reduction in performance comes a lowered price tag: US$129. We've also found out local prices for the GIGABYTE NGTS450 at $185 street, the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU at $239 RRP, and MSI N450GTS at $179 RRP.
Under two hundred bucks will buy you 192 CUDA Cores running at a reference speed of 783MHz, connected to 1GB of GDDR5 memory via a bus 128-bits wide, its flash chips clocked at 900MHz for an effective quad-pumped 3600MHz.
The reference NVIDIA design GTS450 card.
The GTS450 is based on the cut-price NVIDIA GF106 core, which boasts only four Streaming Multiprocessors (explained in our GTX480 review), though it appears to have the full complement of four SMs that each contain 48 CUDA Cores.
The GF106 core architecture.
This is markedly lower-specced compared to the next model up, the GTX460 768MB, which boasts an improvement in quite a few key areas as seen in the table below:
| Card |
GTS450 1GB |
GTX460 768MB |
GTX480 1.5GB |
| Local Price |
$185 |
$235 |
$595 |
| CUDA Cores |
192 |
336 |
480 |
| Core Clock |
783MHz |
675MHz |
700MHz |
| Memory Clock |
900MHz |
900MHz |
924MHz |
| Memory Config |
1GB/128-bit GDDR5 |
768MB/ 192-bit GDDR5 |
1536MB/ 384-bit GDDR5 |
| Power Connectors |
One 6-pin |
Two 6-pin |
One 6-pin, one 8-pin |
| SLI Support |
2-way |
2-way |
2,3,4-way |
| Length |
210mm (8.25 inches) |
210mm (8.25 inches) |
267mm (10.5 inches) |
| Outputs |
2x DVI; 1x Mini-HDMI |
2x DVI; 1x Mini-HDMI |
2x DVI; 1x Mini-HDMI |
| Thermals TDP |
106W |
160W |
250W |
However, the GTS450 isn't intended as a high-performance card at all, and for $185 street it'll offer a serious punch. Will it be punchy enough to knock out the competition, the ATI 5770 at $175?
You'll have to find out how it does in the next Issue of Atomic.
Until our full review, take a look at our gallery of photos provided by the NVIDIA partners who are launching the GTS450 - a whopping eleven different models, all custom-designed and cooled. There'll only be a few boring reference cards in this generation...
Update @ 4:38PM - Added a twelfth card to the gallery!
