ZOTAC GeForce GTS 450 AMP! Edition 1 GB

[W1zzard]

ZOTAC has a long history of releasing overclocked cards that provide extra performance at low cost. Coming at clocks of 873 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory, the card manages to offer 10% extra performance over the NVIDIA reference design, without being noisy or running hot.

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[angelkiller]

OnSemi's NCP5395 is a simple, cost-effective voltage regulator that we have seen on other graphics card designs before. It does not offer I2C voltage control, but a VID based control is available through API in NVIDIA's driver.

Could you explain what VID based control is? Thanks.

 

[MadMan007]

The caption for the picture of the memory chip says "K4G10325FE-HC05" but the chip itself shows "..-HC04." Not sure if it's a typo or mixup or maybe Zotac really is using faster memory If so one would hope memory oc;ing would be better than other cards but it doesn't seem to be.

 

[W1zzard]

fixed the memory chip description. added to overclocking: ZOTAC's card also uses faster memory chips (1250 MHz vs. 1000 MHz), but this can't make any difference in our testing, which suggests that the GPU memory controller is limiting the memory speed, not the memory chips.

 

[zwawy]

Thanks W1zzard .. nice review.

The die area is roughly 228 mm² in size.

Is this true !?

16 by 16 mm = 256 mm

 

[W1zzard]

i measured 14.8 x 15.4

 

[zwawy]

i measured 14.8 x 15.4

GF106 Has different sizes

 

[W1zzard]

GF106 Has different sizes

umm what are you saying?

 

[zwawy]

umm what are you saying?

Nothing .. I just wonder
I believe your measure

 

[newtekie1]

Could you explain what VID based control is? Thanks.

I believe that is is like the VID control that is used in processors for Cool n' Quiet/Speed Step. It allows voltage control on the cheaper non-I2C voltage controllers using driver calls to lower and raise voltages, it is less precise then direct I2C control, but still better than nothing.

I'm pretty sure nVidia implemented it to allow the voltage to be lowered when the card is idle to save power.