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.
Palit has sent us the highest clocked GTS 450 card tested today. It runs at an impressive 932 MHz which is almost 20% more than the NVIDIA reference design. This makes it possible for the card can beat the AMD Radeon HD 5770 when averaged over our benchmarks. I also found Palit's choice of outputs refreshing. You have two DVI ports, one analog VGA and one full-size HDMI port available. This makes it easy for everyone to find the right connector without having to mess with adapters. The cooling solution of the Palit GTS 450 Sonic Platinum is working great, the card emits extremely little fan noise. In my last review of Palit's GTX 460 Sonic Platinum one fan blade broke off by barely touching it. While it might be an isolated issue, keep it in mind when handling the card. Overclocking on Palit's card yielded a solid increase up to 968 MHz, which seems possible only because Palit bumped the GPU voltage on their card slightly, from 1.08V to 1.17V. With a price of $150, the card is reasonably priced for a GTS 450, considering it offers the fastest out-of-the-box experience of all GTS 450 cards we tested today. But it is still not affordable enough in my opinion to beat the HD 5770 which is $10 cheaper.
The final verdict on the GTS 450 itself is not definitive. The GPU does not stay ahead far enough 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.