14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTS 450 card has finally arrived, and Leadtek has decided to join NVIDIA's partners and release a pair of models of its own, one that sticks to the reference specifications while the other one is factory overclocked.
The GeForce GTS 450 video card is the mainstream-level video board that NVIDIA has released for the bulk of the mid-end market.
Previously, the only mainstream board available was the GTX 460, which was only suitable, price and performance-wise, for the upper segment, the performance market as it were.
A bunch of NVIDIA's partners have already delivered their respective custom models, and some of their models even have GPU clock speeds of over 900 MHz.
Leadtek, however, decided not to stray from the base specs overly much, though it still made two cards, one that uses NVIDIA's settings while the other pushes performance a step higher.
Both newcomers, naturally, have 192 CUDA cores, or unified shaders as they are otherwise known, in addition to memory interfaces, for their 1GB of VRAM, of 128 bits.
Needless to say, full support for DirectX 11 is present, as are NVIDIA's PhysX, CUDA, 3D Vision and other technologies.
2-Way SLI is also supported, and this will let gamers and enthusiasts set up multi-GPU configurations, provided their platforms support it.
The 'regular' GTS 450 model has the GF106 running at 783 MHz, while the shaders and the 1GB of GDDR5 memory operate at 1,566 MHz and 3,600 MHz, respectively.
The overclocked board is the Extreme edition and promises to perform better, especially during games, thanks to having the GPU at 850 MHz, the shaders at 1,700 MHz and the memory and 3,600 MHz.
Other specifications include a single-PCI express power connection on each newcomer, in addition to dual-DVI and HDMI outputs. The prices should be of around $130 or $140.