Introducing Galaxy’s GTS 450 SuperOverclock

We would like to introduce Nvidia’s “Sniper”.  It is their midrange GTS 450 video card released today to directly compete with AMD’s HD 5750 at the $129 price point. NVIDIA has finally released its long awaited GeForce GTS based on its new Fermi DX11 GF106 architecture, a reworking of the original Fermi GF100 which we covered in our reviews of the GTX 480, published here, here and here.  Senior Editor BFG10K reviewed GTX 470 here and here and Senior editor MrK covered GTX 465 here.

We are going to examine the performance of Galaxy’s GTS 450 SuperOverclock (SOC), one of two versions they are releasing today for gamers.  We are going to benchmark 21 modern PC games to test the Galaxy GTS 450 SOC which is available from etailers for the suggested price of $149.00 as well as to evaluate the reference GTS 450 and SLI dual-video card performance versus HD 5750, HD 5870, GTX 480 and 8800 GTX.

We also received the reference version of GTS 450 from Nvidia and we have been putting it through its paces for just over a week under NDA.  These two cards both contain the same GPU, but Galaxy promises that they did not just slap a sticker over the reference version.  Here they are side-by-side:

There is quite a bit of difference between the reference version, the Galaxy GTS 450 SC, and the one that we are reviewing, the Galaxy GTS 450 SuperOverclock (SOC) version.  In fact, the Galaxy SOC version sports .4ns memory – the fastest on the market – a 3+1 PWM digital power supply, a MOSFET heatsink and solid components from the company that designs and tests its own products. Take a look at the comparison chart:

Nvidia are months later than their rival AMD Graphics in bringing out the complete lineup of their DX11 video cards. Nvidia’s original intention was to launch GTX 480 with Windows 7. It was a very difficult GPU to manufacture with over 3 billion transistors and 7.2 billion vias on a new 40 nm process at TSMC that had its own issues. To improve the yields, Nvidia cut down the GTX 480’s number of shaders from 512 to 480 so as to guarantee that there would be enough chips to supply a big demand when it finally launched as GTX 480 and GTX 470 to compete with HD 5870 and HD 5850 respectively.  They call their top GTXes their “Tanks” referencing RTS/RPG games and like a tank it uses quite a bit of power in contrast to the nearly silent GTS 450 “Sniper”.

Introducing Nvidia’s Sniper, the GTS 450

After the GTX 470/480, the third launch from Nvidia was GTX 465 to compete with HD 5830 and HD 5770 which we covered.  Nvidia called it their “Hunter” class which later included the GTX 460.  The top three cards each use quite a bit of power and it lead to Nvidia’s reworking of their GF100 GPU into GF104 and their most successful release to date with a trimmed down GTX 460 GPU that became quite power-efficient and very overclockable to go up against HD 5830.  Here is how Nvidia lines up their competition:

Well now it is time for Nvidia’s “sniper”, the GTS 450.  Their “Tanks”, GTX 480/470 are targeted at playing games at the highest resolutions and with maxed out details.  On the other hand, both the Hunter and Sniper classes are targeted at 1920×1080 and below resolutions, with high to maxed details.  In all cases, multi-GPU scaling is supposed to be excellent and we will explore GTS 450 SLI in this review as well as looking at the performance impact of increasing anti-aliasing and/or using PhyX.  Here is the block diagram for GF106’s GTS 450 GPU:

To compare the GTS 450’s capabilities, we need to remember that the GTX 460 uses the GF104 GPU, which utilizes eight Streaming Multiprocessors (384 CUDA Cores and 64 Texture Units). The GTS 450 is based on GF106 which is basically a bit more than one-half of the GF104, with four SMUs (192 CUDA cores and 32 Texture Units with 384KB of L2 cache).  Looking very closely we see a 192 CUDA core GPU with 3 sets of memory controllers (1 disabled) and ROPs, for a combined total of a 192-bit memory bus and 24 ROPs. However, this probably means that GTS 450 is more than half as fast as the GTX 460 as it is clocked at 783MHz, with its shaders operating at 1566 MHz. It uses 1GB of 128-bit GDDR5 at 902MHz and it is also an overclocking monster as the Galaxy GTS 450 SOC will demonstrate.

SLI and the midrange?

Normally, we would not expect a person buying a midrange card to consider SLI.  Often a gamer will buy one card and perhaps later on, add a second one.  However, there are recently more compelling reasons besides increased performance to consider GTS 450 SLI which includes being able to experience Nvidia’s multi-display 2D Surround.  A pair of GTS 450s will only set you back about $260 and we want to see what kind of performance you will get by comparing them to our GTX 480 and the HD 5870 which are comparatively expensive cards and far outside the $260 price range.

To properly bring you this review, we used our two GTS 450s and put them through their paces this week with the very latest performance drivers – GeForce 260.52.  These drivers also promise quite a few innovations from Nvidia which feature using asynchronous SLI and a choice of custom or express installation of GeForce drivers.  You will see us pit our reference design GTS 450 against the Galaxy GTS 450 SOC in 21 modern games and 2 synthetic benchmarks at 1440×900, 1680×1050 and 1920×1080 resolutions. These are the resolutions that most gamers buying GTS 450 are likely to be using.  Many gamers are discovering that their HDTVs at 1080 work very well for PC gaming.

We are also using GTS 450’s direct competitor, HD 5750, to compare performance.  Since many gamers upgrade once every three years, many are still using their 9800 GTs, 8800 GTS and GTXes.  We naturally want to see how a top card from that DX10 generation will fare, and we also included testing our 8800 GTX which did very well against midrange cards of the last generation.  To round out our mix, we are going to compare the top cards of the current generation – GTX 480 ($499) and HD 5870 ($399) – against GTS 450 SLI ($260).  For AMD Graphics cards we use the latest released WHQL Catalyst 10-8 (including Hotfix 10-8b specifically for H.A.W.X.).

Is GTS 450 better than its rival, AMD’s HD 5750, at the $130 price point?

This review will analyze and compare GTS 450 and HD 5750 performance and hopefully we can announce a performance winner. Keep in mind that AMD’s higher performing video card than our HD 5750 – the HD 5770, which is about 20 percent faster – can now be found for $139.  We will also look at the details to see what this new Nvidia GTS brings to the table over its AMD counterpart and perhaps we can compare competing multi-display solutions, Eyefinity to Surround. We also believe that we have a good handle on how AMD is going to respond to Nvidia’s GTS 450 launch and we will share our analysis and insights with you.

Widespread etail availability of the GeForce GTS 450 is happening this week.  Our testing will also help to answer if it is practical to upgrade from 8800 GTX (9800GT, 9800GTX, 8800 GTS) to experience DX11 and tessellation.  Since we do not want to worry about our CPU “bottlenecking” our graphics, we our testing all of our graphics cards with our Intel Core i7 920 at 3.20 GHz, 6 GB Kingston DDR3 and a Gigabyte X58 full 16x + 16x PCIe CrossFire/SLI motherboard. We believe that our platform will be representative of most modern CPUs (including Penryn or Phenom II) at 3.0 and above GHz.

This Galaxy GTS 450 SOC has one of the most unique fan designs – a “flip-fan” that swings out or can be completely removed for cleaning.  It is a great way to keep your overclock cool and it reminds us that Galaxy is constantly innovating ways to improve their design for us.  We love it!  Their PCIe connector is also in a sensible place – where you fingers are not forced to work in the most cramped part of the case as with the reference design.

Before we do performance testing, let’s take a look at the company that makes the GTS 450 SOC:

About Galaxy

Galaxy, established in 1994, is a Nvidia Add-in-Board (AIB) partner which manufactures products from the low-end GeForce 7200 series to the high-end GTX400 series. They manufacture products based on Nvidia’s reference design as well as using their own in-house production facilities to manufacture graphic cards based on their own designs using high-end coolers from Arctic Cooling and others.

Galaxy has shipped to the US for a long time as they built video cards for many of the tier 1 brands in the market today. They realized they could create a brand for themselves and save the end customer the middleman fees. Two years ago they launched Galaxy in the US and their products are now available at Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, Dell.com, Newegg, TigerDirect and many other sites. They have excellent quality and toll-free tech support with a 2 year transferable no-registration warranty.