Extra Extra Read all about it', come on people, learn about the new GeForce GTS 450, we've got ASUS, eVGA, ECS, MSI, NVIDIA, Palit, Sparkle, KFA2 (Galaxy), Inno3D and Gigabyte covered all in this exclusive article.
Hey you know, I was checking up some information on the release of the budget oriented GeForce GTS 450 today. A new lower level mid-range product that is targeted against the Radeon HD 5750. Performance and features wise pretty much the very same products except for PhysX and 3D Surround vision. And while comparing specifications I realized how long it actually has taken NVIDIA to release the mid-range DX11 class products. Get this, our first R5770/5750 reviews date from October 2009 -- yeah, last year.
So, 11 months after the competition released their DX11 class mid-range products, NVIDIA finally inserts a SKU into the market with roughly the same performance. Man, that's arriving late to the market alright.
Either way, at roughly 120 EUR, NVIDIA today releases the GeForce GTS 450. A cute mid-range graphics card armed with DirectX 11 compatibility that comes with one full gigabyte of graphics memory. The product is targeted at gamers with a set budget in mind. Decent performance at a reasonable price. NVIDIA themselves find this card ideal for gamers who play their games with a monitor up-to a resolution of roughly 1600x1200, and that's a fair suggestion in this price range. Competition wise, NVIDIA feels the Radeon HD 5750 is the card to beat.
The card, as rumored for weeks, indeed comes with 192 shader processors, 1 GB of quad data rate GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit wide interface. A card that is clocked at 783/1566/900 MHz (core/shader/memory) with a maximum power draw of a bright light bulb, 106W.
Below, an overview of the products tested today. We'll have a look at reference performance, but obviously a handful of NVIDIA's board partners also submitted their cards for a review. Pretty much all of them come pre-overclocked and/or have some custom cooling applied.
The cards tested today are:
- ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCu TOP
- ECS GTX 450 Black
- eVGA GTS 450 FTW
- Gigabyte GTS 450 OC
- Inno3D GTS 450 Freezer
- KFA2 GTS 450 LTD OC
- MSI N450GTS Cyclone
- NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 reference
- Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum
- Sparkle Calibre X450G
Have a peek of what that looks like, and then let's head onward to the next page please where we'll first dive into the GPU architecture.
The GF106 GPU
Based on Fermi architecture, the 3rd chip derived from the Fermi family of GPUs is now born. The GeForce GTS 450 series is to be based on a new chip. Initially the Fermi architecture that you have all seen on the GTX 465, 470 and 480 is based on the GF100 chip. Then the upper mid-range and very successful GeForce GTX 460 was based on the GF104, a smaller chip with less transistors (2.1 Billion to be precise), called the GF104.
In the initial release this GF106 GPU will be used solely for one SKU, a GeForce GTX 460 with 768MB of graphics memory and the GeForce GTS 450 that is armed with 1024MB of memory. That memory is quad data-rate, gDDR5 memory that runs over a 128-bit wide bus.
The GeForce GTS 450 comes with 192 shader processors spread out over four Streaming Multi-processor clusters (SM). That translates into a Texture Memory Unit count of 32, and thus 16 ROPs.
The reference core clock frequency of this product is 783 MHz, the shader processors are clocked at a tact frequency of 1566 MHz, and the 128-bit gDDR5 memory has an effective data rate of 3600 MHz.
This package is intended to create a product that replaces the GeForce GTS 250 and will compete with the Radeon HD 5750 series.
The GeForce GTS 450 cards will be fully fledged DirectX 11 class cards with nice tessellation performance and the full DX11 API feature set. Though only a handful of games really show significant DX11 class quality, we really feel that if you are in the market for a new graphics card, DX11 is obviously the path to follow.
Let's compare some of the specs of the GeForce GTX 450, the GeForce GTX 460 and 465.
Reference specifications:
| Graphics card | GeForce GTS 450 | GeForce GTX 460 | GeForce GTX 465 |
| Graphics Processing Clusters | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors | 4 | 7 | 11 |
| Shader processor | 192 | 336 | 352 |
| Texture Units | 32 | 56 | 44 |
| ROPs | 16 | 32 | 32 |
| Core Clock | 783 MHz | 675 MHz | 607 MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1566 MHz | 1350 MHz | 1215 MHz |
| Memory Data rate | 3608 MHz | 3600 MHz | 3200 MHz |
| Memory | 1024MB GDDR5 | 1024MB GDDR5 | 1024MB GDDR5 |
| Memory interface | 128-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| Memory bandwidth | 57.7 GB/s | 115.2 GB/s | 102.6 GB/S |
| Texture Fillrate Bilinear | 25.1 GigaTexels/sec | 37.8 GigaTexels/sec | 26.7 GigaTexels/sec |
| Fab node | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| TDP | 106 Watts | 160 Watts | 200 Watts |
So yes, compared to the GTX 460 the GTS 450 is quite... castrated. Now if we look closely at the engine, then you can see and calculate that the 192 Shader Processors based GF106 has in fact four Streaming Multi-Processor clusters partitions. Four 48 Stream Processor clusters are enabled = 192 Shader Processors. But we expect other SKUs in the future as well with one or more SMs disabled.
click to enlarge |
Here's the GPU block diagram setup, one graphics processing cluster tied to four SMs, each with 48 Shader Processors and two 64-bit memory controllers. The GF106 was allowed to keep its 256KB L2 cache memory.
Die size wise NVIDIA these days absolutely refuses to give us numbers. So we measured it ourselves, the die is 16 by 16 mm (see photo below).
So the card in its baseline/reference setup will be clocked at 783 MHz on the core frequency, and in NVIDIA's typical 1:2 setup mode 1566 MHz on the shader processors. There will be good overclocking headroom left on these boards, 850 MHz should not be an issue, even without voltage tweaking.
The gDDR5 memory will be clocked at a shy 3.6 Gbps which is 3608MHz effectively (902 MHz (x4) quad data rate). As such, the GPU has two 64-bit memory controllers tied to it which boils down to 128-bit memory.
The GeForce GTS 450 cards are based on a dual-slot cooling design and come with two dual-link DVI and a mini-HDMI connector. HDMI will pass sound through, including bit streaming support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
Being a mid-range product, only 2-way SLI will be allowed and thus you'll only see a single SLI finger/connector on the PCBs. Okay, the next stop will be an extensive photo-shoot of the product(s) tested today.
NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 REFERENCE
Here's where we start off the photo gallery showing you all cards tested today, and we do have quite a lot of them. No less than ten cards will be covered in today's article. We'll handle them in alphabetical order yet start off with the NVIDIA reference cards.
So there it is, the GTS 450. We have two reference cards in-house as in a separate article we'll handle SLI performance as well. Overall a familiar looking design, resembling GeForce GTX 460 a lot actually.
Most reference design based cards will come with two digital DVI and a mini-HDMI connector. Board partners however are free to use whatever connectivity they want. Especially in the custom design card segment we'll see a lot of variation. The dual-slot cooler is really silent, in fact you cannot hear it even if you tried to.
All GeForce GTS 450 cards come with one 6-pin PEG power connector that feeds the card 75 Watts, and another 75 Watts is supplied through the PCIe slot. With a TDP of just over 100 Watts this is more than sufficient.
What you'll notice today is that pretty much all cards use Samsung memory, rated 0.4 and 0.5ns. NVIDIA's reference design allows for a clock of 3600 (divided by four / quad data-rate = 900 MHz). The ICs however are all pretty much rated 0.5ns or 0.4ns. If we take the 0.4ns ICs, then in theory we should be able to reach 5000 MHz on the memory and 4000 MHz on 5ns memory (effective data rates).
Anyway, we'll have a peek at that in our overclock session. Let's move onwards to the AIB partner products, we'll show them in alphabetical order, starting thus with ASUS.
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