14 DAY TRIAL // Though it already has a pair of GeForce GTS 450 cards on the loose, Gigabyte has now come out and begun shipping a third model, one which uses a special cooler in order to enable high factory overclocking that few other iterations of the same card can claim to match.
The GeForce GTS 450 is the Fermi-based video board that NVIDIA has provided for the bulk of the mainstream graphics market.
It was designed as a sort of replacement for the highly-popular GeForce GTS 250 which had been losing ground in front of AMD's offering quite quickly, as the latter has been selling DirectX 11 boards for all segments for months.
It is equipped with 192 CUDA cores, 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, a memory interface of 128 bits and, of course, support for DirectX 11, among other things.
Its base frequencies are of 783 MHz for the GF106 graphics processing unit (GPU), 1,566 MHz for the shaders and 3,600 for the VRAM.
This new model from Gigabyte takes those clocks a fair bit higher while the WindForce 2X cooler, composed of two copper heatpipes, a copper core and a pair of fans. makes sure that the extra heat is taken care of.
The 1GB of GDDR5 memory has an operating clock speed of 4,000 MHz, 400 MHz over the stock version.
Additionally, the shaders have a speed of 1,860 MHz and, finally, the GPU itself is driven all the way up to 930 MHz.
This board is the second GF106-based Gigabyte Card to be made available and is known by the name of GV-N450OC2-1GI.
Needless to say, besides DirectX 11, the video controller supports NVIDIA's various technologies, such as PhysX, CDUA, 3D Vision, SLI etc.
Those interested in it will be able to find it already listed on Newegg, where it has a price tag of $150.