Today NVIDIA launches their new GeForce GTS 450 Series of graphics cards. As the “GTS” naming suggests, the card is more of a mid-range part than a high-performance device. It is NVIDIA’s expressed goal to offer a low priced DirectX 11 graphics card that the majority of gamers can afford – and still play the latest games.

NVIDIA’s GF106 GPU is based on NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture, which was released earlier this year. In order to achieve the product performance and positioning NVIDIA was looking for, they disabled some components of the full GF106 core, resulting in the graphics processor for the GeForce GTS 450. Unlike other Fermi-class cards the changes here are quite limited. Basically NVIDIA removed two memory chips from the design, two chips less means 2x 32-bit less bus interface, so a single 64-bit memory controller got disabled. (…)

The ASUS ENGTS 450 TOP DirectCU that we have on our test bench today is a factory overclocked version that comes at substantially increased clocks compared to the reference design: 925 MHz vs. 783 MHz. As cooling solution ASUS’ DirectCU cooler is used which we have seen on a variety of other recent cards from ASUS.

• READ MORE (Source): ASUS ENGTS450 TOP DirectCU 1 GB Review – Page 1/32 | techPowerUp