Galaxy NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 1GB Review – Fermi goes lower, again

Testing Methodology and System Setup

The Galaxy Super OC model runs quite a bit faster than the standard reference speeds: 888 MHz base clock, 1776 MHz shader clock and 1000 MHz memory clock.  Both the base clock and shader clock are 13.5% faster than the default speeds while the memory gets a boost of about 10%.  Oh, and I really really want to believe that the 1776 MHz shader clock is in reference to American independence…maybe I should start reading into EVERY clock speed these guys come up with?

For our performance comparison the new GeForce GTS 450 reference card will be compared to the Galaxy retail model so we can see what advantages getting an out-of-the-box overclocked GPU will have for your gaming experience.  I also have included the GeForce GTX 460 768MB card so we can see how much faster GF104 is that GF106.  Finally, we have included our latest results from the Radeon HD 5770 1GB Flex card to see how well NVIDIA’s new beast does against the more mature HD 5000-series at the same price point. 

We tested most of our games at 1680×1050, 1920×1200 and even 2560×1600.  I know that having a 30″ panel with a $129 GPU isn’t very likely, but we still want to see how far these new GPUs can stretch so we felt no need to REMOVE that data from the review.  If it doesn’t concern you, just skip those graphs. 

I did have a few hours to get some good SLI testing in, so look for that on one of the later pages as well.

• Testing Configuration
• ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution X58 + nForce 200
• Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz
• 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz
• Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD
• Corsair Professional Series AX1200 watt power supply (Thanks!)
  
• NVIDIA Driver version: 260.52
• ATI Driver version: 10.8
  
• Monitors: 1 x 2560×1600 30″ Apple Cinema display
  

Let’s get to the benchmarks!!