Like a bat out of... that burning place. Nell? Smell? Oh, right - hell! But this hot card is too literally so...
We've gone Fermi mad this month, and alongside the original GF100 and GF104 cores comes yet another variant: the GF106. Counter intuitively, the GF106 is the ultra-budget member of the family, and to get down to a sub-$200 price point there have been a few things lost as we move away from its bigger brothers. As we saw online (link above), the GF106 core is a model that gives manufacturers free reign on board design, meaning that instead of a few choices at launch, there are many. What does Gainward decide to do? Clock the hell out of the card.
Named in full as the 'Gainward GTS450 Golden Sample: Goes Like Hell Edition', this card takes the reference NVIDIA core clock of 783MHz and boosts it by 147Mhz, a whopping 19 per cent speed increase that is guaranteed stable. Memory speeds get a boost as well, and have been raised 100MHz to eke out a little more performance from the 1GB of GDDR5 chips onboard. Sadly while this is indeed a high memory clockspeed, the bus connecting the chips to the GF106 core is a slight 128-bit wide, and is quite restrictive when loading large textures.
Performance is also much lower than we had expected given the price point of the GF106 card, which boasts only 192 CUDA processing cores; compared to the next model up, this is almost a halving. A benefit of this is a very noticeable reduction in power consumption, which peaks at a reference of 106W, and will translate into a cooler-running system compared to higher-end cards.
Other Fermi architecture features such as the Polymorph and Raster engines remain, though they are tweaked slightly downwards to realise the lower processing capacity of the core. The GF106 core is roughly split into four general collections of CUDA cores, called Streaming Multiprocessors, of which the GTS450 contains the full complement. Any cards lower than the GTS450 will most likely use the same design, with one or two SMs disabled.
With such a substantial overclock enabled from the factory, Gainward has designed its own cooler to take the higher-than-reference heat load and dissipate it efficiently - so much so that our sample idled at 31 degrees, and was barely noticeably warm. Load temperatures hit a whopping 71 degrees, and the delta of forty degrees shows the cooler design can barely cope with the load. It's based around a simple copper block, into which two heatpipes are embedded, which in turn take the heat to a series of aluminium fins encased in a plastic shroud. An 80mm fan provides all the airflow needed, though due to its central location this means that some heat will escape within the case, rather than be exhausted externally. It's also only decently loud; idling at an ignorable 55.4dBA, but reaching a 'notice-me' 57.1dBA under load.
Performance in games is ultimately where most will be interested, and sadly the GTS450 simply isn't what we were hoping for. Crysis pulls an unplayable 21.81fps on our High settings, with Lost Planet 2 similarly showing a lack of oomph. Though 3DMark scores appear to be on parity with the competition, the ATI 5770, once PhysX is taken into account it actually loses - and this is with the core overclocked to within an inch of its life.
The GTS450 GLH isn't so hot with games, but neither is it a great overclocker: we could only squeeze another three per cent from the card, returning P11850 points in 3DMark. Though it does come with a voucher for 25% off "Super Loiloscope", a CUDA-accelerated video program, this isn't enough value to make it an entirely appealing.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012