 This is a sample that just arrived in the mail today, so we're gonna be doing an unboxing, and then an unboxing! Because this is actually just the shipping box. So, if seal has been broken, check contents. The seal has not been broken, but we're gonna check the contents anyway, because that's apparently my job. Alright, we have broken the seal. We find bubble wrap. Aha! PNY has done an excellent job of packaging this particular graphics card. There's nothing else inside the box. So this is a GeForce GTS 450 from PNY. I don't know if this one is included, actually. But, uh, hold on, hold on, hold on, wait for it. Let me check this out. Warranty service. Huh! Look at that! This is interesting. Okay, because PNY recently updated their high-end video cards to offer a lifetime warranty. And I wasn't really sure if a mid-range video card like this would be included in that policy, but while they are not offering a lifetime warranty, they do have a five-year warranty. Which is actually excellent for a mid-range card like this. I mean, this is only a 149, 139-ish sort of graphics card, and that's, uh, that's outstanding, actually. So we'll have a quick look at the features over all of this card. It's a 783 MHz core clock, it has 192 processor cores, it has a 1.566 GHz processor clock. Okay, so remember, that's double the core clock, alright. And then we've got 1 GB of GDDR5. You can actually read all the specs here if you so desire. The more important things on a card like this are actually the features, because this is part of Nvidia's DirectX lineup of cards. It's, like I said, a mainstream level card, so it's positioned under the GTX 460, but it does still come with all the Nvidia features. That means you've got CUDA, Physics, SLI, 3D Vision capability, even though they don't have 3D Vision listed here, they should, including 3D Vision Surround. So that is, if you run two of these cards in SLI, you will have full support for, there it is, 3D Vision Surround. The cameraman's trying to burn me here again. Let's see what we've got in terms of games that they're demoing here. So they've got Civilization V is really pitched as a card, as a game, that will run great on the GTX 450. They've also got Mafia II if you're running at non-HD resolution, so anything about 1680x1050 or lower. This card actually performs admirably well in Mafia II, so that's another pretty cool one, and that includes running with physics on, which provides a much, much better gameplay experience in a game like that than trying to run without physics. Oh, this is cool too, check this out. This is a promotion that PNY has been running for quite a while, but they actually include two bonus movie downloads. So if you check out PNY.com slash movies, you can see which movies you can get for free with this video card. Oh yeah, there it is, five-year warranty. That wouldn't have been that hard to find if I had looked for it more carefully. And you know what, here, here is a special Linus Tech Tips promotional offer. I'm just gonna take apart the box. Okay, okay, okay. Whoever sees this first, so that means you smart guy who writes the first comment. Right there. Oh, he looks at the other one. Okay, well there's a StarCraft II trial, okay. And then there's the two bonus movie downloads, and then if you really want a three-month subscription to ESEA, then you can have that too. So there we go. Yay, promotional excitement. Linus Tech Tips, free stuff. Alright, here we go inside. This is kind of a new way of doing packaging for PNY, I haven't seen this before. Nice black internal box, and then it looks like it comes in like a little bubble thing here. So, okay, hold on. First, let's flip it over this way, I guess. So we see the accessories. First of all, we have a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter. Then we have a dual 4-pin Molex to 6-pin PCIe power adapter. And then a DVI to VGA adapter if you're still running an old monitor. And someone was all indignant about me saying that VGA monitors are old. Well, they are. If your monitor only has VGA, then it's old. You can see here they've got the 259.22 graphics drivers. Throw this away, because Nvidia just released their new 260 series drivers, which provide better performance for the GTS 450. Here is a quick start guide. Okay. And then let's have a look at the card itself. So this one features a blue PCB, as well as the Nvidia stock reference cooler. So I'm going to have a closer look at the reference cooler, because PNY does typically release reference boards. And I'll explain what reference mean. That means they haven't done a redesign of the PCB layout, but rather they are manufacturing based on Nvidia's recommended layout for the RAM, the core, everything else that goes on the video card itself, including, in this case, the cooler. So let's have a look at the back here. You can see we've got four RAM chips here. There are going to be four RAM chips on the other side. So that means that that's your one gig of GDDR5, although it looks like we do have support for up to four more RAM chips. So potentially PNY could release a 1.5 gig or a 768 meg version of this card in the future. Here we've got the SLI connector. So this card supports up to two-way SLI. Down at the bottom you can see a curious thing that I also noticed on the MSI 450 card. You can see that some of the traces here do not terminate into pins. So it looks like this card is able to run at PCI Express 16x. That means full PCIe 2.0 bandwidth without all of the pins. That's not an aspect of PCIe technology that I was aware of, but there you go. Here we've got two DVI ports and one mini HDMI. Remember, you can only use two of these at a time. That means either dual DVI or one DVI, one mini HDMI, one DVI, one mini HDMI. Here we have an exhaust vent. And this is something that I want to point out about this particular card, because, as I said, it uses the reference cooler. That means that probably about, with this shroud, about half of the airflow coming out of this card is going to be exhausted from the case. And then maybe about another half is going to come down from the fan and be exhausted out the back of the shroud. So that means that it's a good compromise between something like a normal blower heat sink, where you actually have to position the fan way over here. You don't get quite that same efficiency as when you're blowing air right down onto the core. Something like the MSI cyclone cooler, where, yeah, you're putting heat pipes and everything all over it, but you're exhausting the hot air into your case. So, yeah, like I said, it's a compromise, and it's one that personally I can live with. Here on the back of the card, we find a six-pin PCIe power connector, as well as a four-pin PWM fan controller. So that means this fan should be quite quiet, although we will do some testing with this against the MSI cyclone cooler in the coming days. Up here, we find PNY's branding. As you can see, this is a reference shroud, so that means that it's just a sticker on top of it. And I think that covers pretty much everything in terms of the unboxing of the PNY GTS 450, and we will have more to come, including some SLI numbers for the 450, now that I have my second one. Now, I think I actually glossed over this too fast. As I was boxing the card back up, I noticed just how ingenious this packaging method is. So PNY has actually gone and custom designed a plastic shroudy thing that looks like it can fit any number of graphics cards. So all you've got is your little stopper here. I'm actually going to take the top cover off here. So you've got a little stopper right here that keeps it from sliding back and forth, and then you've got a little hook right here where the PCIe retention clip sits. So it can't slide back, see that? It can't slide forward because of this one here, where that little knob goes into. So it can't slide back, it can't slide forward. It has this top cover piece on it that gives it like a cushion of air all the way around the card. So even if the box gets just like hammered on in shipping, the card will be completely safe. And yeah, it doesn't use any of that non-biodegradable foam or anything like that. A solution like this keeps the card completely safe from any kind of static damage that could happen, like when foam is rubbing against itself. I mean, there is anti-static foam, but it's probably more expensive. Anyway, I think this is just one of the more clever ways I've ever seen a video card packaged. So I thought I'd just kind of give PNY a quick kudos on moving forward in terms of video card packaging.