Reviews - Pro-Clockers! PC Reviews One MegaHertz At A Time

Introduction to the Gigabyte GTS 450

A lot of people compared the very successful GTX 460, which is probably the best bang for your buck, to the old 8800GT. The comparisons are not with out merit either, they both offered the best performance for the dollar during their reign, of which the GTX 460 is still currently reigning. They were also both priced affordably, and the GTX 460 is currently able to be had for as low as $190, possibly cheaper when special offers or deals are about.

But with the GTX 460's success and the past success of the 8800GT, what is Nvidia to offer the budget-minded consumer who is after a deal, but doesn't necessarily want to sacrifice performance? It seems the GTS 450 which is based on the new GF-106 core, might be the answer to the green-camp's prayers, as it packs some very decent specifications for a card that is suspected to cost about $150. This is the price point that is aimed at the moderate gamer, and there are a lot of us out there.

Pre-release rumors suggested this card would have four streaming processors, containing just 48 shaders each, for a grand total of 192. After release we see these rumors are correct, but the card is more than just shaders, the GTS 450 has some rather impressive ram and core clocks as well. The reference clocks are 783MHz and 1566MHz, for core and memory respectfully, all on a 128-bit bus.

Today, we will be taking a look at our first GTS 450 GPU, coming from our friends at Gigabyte. The GF106 offering is in direct competition with AMD's Radeon 5770, which while in the same price range, has been around for some time now. In the case of this particular GTS 450, it comes already overclocked at 810Mhz, bypassing the lowly 783MHz of the reference models. Follow along as we put this card through it's paces, and after our testing is finished, we can determine who ends up being the $150 price point champ.