NVIDIA's new GeForce GTS 450 is a solid implementation of the Fermi architecture for the lower midrange segment. The cards have enough power to play the latest titles at resolutions up to, including 1680x1050. Older games will run just fine at 1920x1200 too. This enables users to enjoy current DirectX 11 titles at a reasonable cost point below $150. The problem? ATI has had their sub-$150 DirectX 11 Radeons out on the market since October 2009, almost a year now. To me it feels a bit like NVIDIA is still playing the catch-up game. Don't get me wrong, the GTS 450 is a great little card but it doesn't seem to bring any big surprises. Neither performance wise, nor price wise.
It also puzzles me why NVIDIA's reference design comes at such low clocks that almost every board partner would be out of his mind to not overclock and ask a premium for the boards. This means that NVIDIA's $129 reference design price is only a baseline with the majority of designs reaching well into the $140 area -which is HD 5770's hunting ground. One thing that NVIDIA has to tip things in its favor are features such as CUDA, PhysX, 3D Vision, and out of the box support for Blu-ray 3D.
MSI GTS 450 Cyclone OC sits in the middle of the factory-overclock spectrum of GTS 450 cards we tested today. Thanks to its Cyclone cooler and excellent fan settings in the BIOS, the card is the quietest GTS 450 card tested today. This makes it a potential choice for a gaming capable media PC. Running at the reference design voltage of 1.08V it has a low power consumption and runs cool, but overclocking will be lower than on other GTS 450 cards. Using MSI's Afterburner you can easily adjust the voltages yourself to make up for that shortcoming. Price-wise, the MSI GTS 450 is one of the most affordable GTS 450 cards we tested today, but pricing usually changes quickly once competition between card vendors starts.
The final verdict on the GTS 450 itself is not definitive. The GPU does not stay ahead of the Radeon HD 5700 series to create the kind of dilemma buyers faced that made them choose the GeForce GTX 460 768 MB over the Radeon HD 5770 when the former first came out. Instead, it's stuck in between the HD 5750 and HD 5770, and leans very close to the HD 5750 in terms of performance. Choosing a card in this segment has been a tough decision, and will now be even harder. Bring in the dice.