Nvidia GeForce GTS 450: Hello GF106, Farewell G92

[cangelini]

After dutifully serving the mainstream gaming community for three years, Nvidia's G92 is finally being played out. Meet GF106, the little engine behind GeForce GTS 450. Is this 192-core part still potent, or did Nvidia cut too much from G92's replacement?

Nvidia GeForce GTS 450: Hello GF106, Farewell G92 : Read more

 

[Poisoner]

Man, G92 still holds it own. What an amazing piece of technology.

 

[welshmousepk]

Slightly underwhelming to be honest. the GTX 460 seems like a way better choice. or a 5770.

 

[IzzyCraft]

Well now that it is competing with the 5750 maybe they will push both down to $100 and we wouldn't need to buy old G92 or R700's

 

[teeoneimme]

anyone else NOT so excited about this card?

 

[skora]

As Chris pointed out with Tessellation, DX11 isn't going anywhere fast with the programmers. I'd say still go for a 1gb 4850 or CF two and really have a powerful GPU subsystem for the $200-$220 price point. By the time they are aged, you'll have 2nd gen DX11 GPUs out and the software will finally be available to use them.

 

[eklipz330]

im still chuggin along on my hd 4850... and if i ever needed to, i can crossfire another one for a mere $90, these cards have been overpriced for a year

its a shame that ati's cards didn't drop in MSRP. hell, the hd 5850 is finally approaching it;s MSRP of $250 from a year ago. I was hopign last year by around this time, hd 5870 would be ~$200... it's not even close =[

 

[Jzcaesar]

Man, I was hoping to see some overclocking; hopefully, they'll be included in another article. But I agree with Chris: the 450 is a bit disappointing at $130.

 

[one-shot]

YAWWWWNN....This card is putting me to sleep. I'm going to bed.

 

[duk3]

I'd like a gtx 460 maxcore.
Perhaps a gtx 485 aka gtx 460 X2 would be nice as well.

 

[sandypants]

Just bought a second 4870 1 GB to complete my CF setup which was planned 1.5 years ago. Only $130 from Newegg. 4870 vs 450 is not a tough choice if you are buying for a dedicated gaming rig. The 4000 series are still very adequate.

 

[cmartin011]

sleep sounds good, not impressed at all. nvidia wasted money on a card slower than previous generations, should have renamed the G92 again with a smaller die, less power more value what were they thinking???

 

[megamanx00]

No, it can't play Crysis

 

[tocbuxu]

Well i should stick w/ my 2 years old OC'ed GTS250

 

[Tamz_msc]

The silver lining here is SLI. With two GeForce GTS 450s rendering cooperatively, we’re seeing 190% of a single card’s performance consistently. If two GeForce GTS 450s run $260 or so, then you’re looking at a $40 premium over a single GeForce GTX 460 1 GB at $220. We’re not as excited as we were after comparing two GTX 460s to a single GTX 480. But still, SLI’s tremendous scaling potential remains a reason to keep two of these cards in mind for a future upgrade.

This is the only reason to get this card, though the price will have to drop to something around 100$ for people to get these cards in SLI.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

hmmm... not terribly impressed. Power consumption and heat levels look good, and SLI scaling is excellent once again. And I guess it does hold its own against the HD5750, barely. The GTX460 definitely did a better job of catching my attention. I guess I was just expecting a little more performance out of a 192 SP gf106, especially considering their plan to replace the g92. One thing that struck me when reading the specs was the memory bandwidth, it just seems a bit too low for a GPU of this complexity. The GTS450 probably should've had a higher stock memory frequency, though I'm not sure how much of a difference it would've made.

 

[experimentxx]

Still can't match the current outgoing radeons.. 450 offers 5750 performance for the price of 5770.. The new amd radeon cards would probably kill NVIDIA, again.

Would have considered this card last year though.

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]Jzcaesar[/nom]Man, I was hoping to see some overclocking; hopefully, they'll be included in another article. But I agree with Chris: the 450 is a bit disappointing at $130.[/citation]

Hi Jz!
I know, the overclocking stuff is always sexy to look at. The thing is, when someone tells me "Check out the overclocking on this card--it's a beast," then I know the boards are hand-picked. It's only worthwhile to look at overclocking if you take a retail card and compare it against a competitor's retail board as well. We'll have something like this in the near future. For the time being, though, don't stress too much over the lack of overclocked results--if you can't buy the clocks we'd see, then it's not worth the trouble, right?

All the best!
Chris

 

[stingstang]

[citation][nom]sandypants[/nom]Just bought a second 4870 1 GB to complete my CF setup which was planned 1.5 years ago. Only $130 from Newegg. 4870 vs 450 is not a tough choice if you are buying for a dedicated gaming rig. The 4000 series are still very adequate.[/citation]
Agreed. Unfortunately since the 5700 series is the SAME as the 4700 series, ATI did something with the marketing, and it's extremely hard to find a real 4870 online. I have 2 of them from 2 years ago. I JUST started using crossfire playing the single player of starcraft 2, and I don't get any performance out of it. Reason? Uses more than 4gb of RAM during heavy load. Daaaang!

 

[super_tycoon]

you guys ought to do an article about SLI _and_ CF scaling. Compare it across different architectures and see if it'd really be worth getting another 4000 or 9000 series card versus buying into a more recent generation (it makes sense if you subtract from the cost of the card the money you can get from selling your older card)

it is also worth noting that newegg's stock of last gen performance cards is tiny (just six gtx 200 cards left!) and perhaps this should be taken into consideration as well

 

[luke904]

[citation][nom]eklipz330[/nom]im still chuggin along on my hd 4850... and if i ever needed to, i can crossfire another one for a mere $90, these cards have been overpriced for a yearits a shame that ati's cards didn't drop in MSRP. hell, the hd 5850 is finally approaching it;s MSRP of $250 from a year ago. I was hopign last year by around this time, hd 5870 would be ~$200... it's not even close =[[/citation]

the msrp of the 5850 is 289, not 250
5870-389

 

[reprotected]

SLI = YES
Single = NO

End of story.

 

[dragonsqrrl]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Hi Jz!I know, the overclocking stuff is always sexy to look at. The thing is, when someone tells me "Check out the overclocking on this card--it's a beast," then I know the boards are hand-picked. It's only worthwhile to look at overclocking if you take a retail card and compare it against a competitor's retail board as well. We'll have something like this in the near future. For the time being, though, don't stress too much over the lack of overclocked results--if you can't buy the clocks we'd see, then it's not worth the trouble, right? All the best!Chris[/citation]
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3909/nvidias-geforce-gts-450-pushing-fermi-in-to-the-mainstream/17

Overclocked to the max on air cooling, it looks like the GTS450 is capable of outperforming the HD5770, barely. But this is with clocks approaching 1GHz. Again, memory bandwidth is probably really holding this card back. According to Anandtech they weren't able to achieve much of a memory overclock, so bandwidth in the 60GB per sec range is probably the max you can expect.

 

[darthvidor]

G92 still holds very well, I don't see a reason to upgrade other than the need for dx11.

 

[anonymousdude]

Still rocking my sli 8800gt. Still performs great after all these years.