Not exactly a rockin’ card from Zotac - it's a little bit of fail on all fronts for the Amp! Edition GTS 450.
In a growing trend that suggests NVIDIA partners are all too happy to take advantage of the design freedom offered them by the green giant at the launch of the GTS450 card, Zotac launched their Amp! Edition alongside a wave of competing designs – each that had their own unique ideas to bring to the table. With the landscape so muddied by these sets of footprints, all walking their own directions, we followed this one to its conclusion – and if you’re an enthusiast worth your salt, you won’t be too impressed.
The engine running at the heart of the Amp! is the NVIDIA GF106, a budget graphics processor that is charged with a piddling complement of 192 CUDA Cores. These cores are factory overclocked by 92MHz, which represents an increase of 12 per cent. This isn’t as impressive as the Gainward GTS450 GS from Issue 118, which was clocked much higher at 930MHz. Memory speeds receive a slight boost from a reference 902MHz to 1000MHz, and the 1GB of GDDR5 chips function at an effective 4000MHz due to the quad-pumped design. Overclocking the memory was an odd choice in retrospect; the memory bus is only 128-bits wide, and can’t begin to touch the speeds achieved by higher-end graphics cards.
The situation becomes noticeably stranger when considering the lack of pricing information available for this Zotac model. Though the Amp! Edition is not listed online for sale, the standard Zotac GTS450 can be had for $180. Extrapolating out and allowing for an overclock would place the Amp! at something closer to $220; the aforementioned Gainward is a meek $165, and is higher-clocked to boot.
Ignoring that for now, and giving the Zotac the benefit of the doubt, we threw it at our graphics testrig and gave it a run through our benchmark suite. Unsurprisingly the Amp! scraped lower performance results in both Crysis and Lost Planet 2, though in each case the difference was less than a frame a second. Not exactly a game-changer! Heaven under an extremely tessellated load produced a similar margin of change, though 3DMark Vantage performed slightly in the Zotac card’s favour. We imagine this is due to updated drivers more than anything, and isn’t very surprising – though it’s a point in favour for keeping up-to-date!
With performance failing to overwhelmingly impress us we took our usual temperature measurements – idle measured at Windows 7 desktop after a 3DMark Vantage run has had time to hit equilibrium, and load measured during the final stages of our Crysis tests – perhaps here was where the card could win us back over? Annoyingly we found the opposite result: the Amp! idled slightly warmer than the Gainward, though peaked one degree cooler at load. Zotac does manage to scrape a few points in the silence stakes, idling at 51.6dBA that barely increases under load to reach 52.8dBA.
This is such a slight difference that we can effectively give it an overall stamp of “inoffensively quiet”. The only other area of distinction worth mentioning are the display outputs, which comprise two DVI, one HDMI and a DisplayPort connector. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, though it’s nice to have a little flexibility.
The GF106 core fills in a void that very few readers really care about – it’s neither fast enough for high-end gaming, nor power-conscious enough to be a great small form-factor choice. This iteration of the GTS450 costs far too much to tempt, and can’t back up the price with performance enough to give it appealing value.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012