 As you can see that is a video card on the test bench that is the brand spanking new GeForce GTS 450 from Nvidia. This is the cyclone OC that is overclocked edition from MSI has one gig of RAM so you can see I have the box for it here Along with a couple cards that I'm going to be comparing it against today So first of all we want to compare it against the GTX 460 so you can see I have a cyclone OC 1 gig card from MSI for that comparison point Here's the box for the GTS 450 which is the one on the test bench right now and Because it's one of the closest price competitors on the ATI side although slightly more expensive at launch the 5770 will also be included in the comparison today we're just going to run some simple numbers and and Yeah, let's see how it goes both from a performance standpoint as well as from a there's my energy meter power Consumption standpoint the test platform. Why don't we go through that really quick you can see I have like ghetto plastic in between these To keep them from touching it's because I left my test bench And I don't really have one to use at the moment, but that's neither here nor there We have a 4.15 gigahertz core i7 980x under a cooler here we have 12 gigs of OCZ special edition DDR3 RAM the big bang X power MSI motherboard and we have a 90 plus percent efficient Fanless power supply actually running the whole thing so that's going to give us a really good idea of how much power is actually Being drawn the hard drive is going to be an OCZ Vertex le 200 gig drive, and I guess that pretty much covers the test platform Alright well our vantage run is complete so you can see the gts 450 scored 11,431 3d marks with 9,200 of those almost 9,300 being on the GPU score now. I want to just point something out This benchmark is not particularly useful for comparing the 450 to the 5770 But when you're looking at two cards within the same architecture family, so these are both Fermi based derivatives Okay, so if we compare it against the 460 it on the same platform it should give us at least a fairly good Indication of how the power of these cards compares to each other speaking of power the 450 maxed out at 337 watts during our vantage test, so let's bear that number in mind for later Next benchmark is crisis, so this is running at 10 1680 by 1050 that's the word I was looking for it is running at you can see our last run was 61 frames per second that was the first run out of the bench though so usually that one goes a little bit slower So you can see the average FPS for this particular run through is about 66 frames per second like I said I'm running at 1680 by 1050 There you go 65.5. Five is what it scored on that one I am running with all details medium because really we're looking at Cards that are in the 149 sort of price range for the most part. I mean this one goes up to around 249 but you can't really expect at almost HD resolution to be You know turning up the details to max unless you're starting to invest in more expensive cards like for example over here We've got a 460 lightning and we've got a GTX 480 I mean if you're an enthusiast you want to run at HD plus resolutions all high details anti aliasing etc speaking of which I'm not Using anti aliasing those over there are going to be the cards for you But you can see the GTX 450 does post very respectable numbers And I mean crisis at medium still looks great. So that is how that went Okay, the mafia 2 run is going to be a little bit different first of all I want you to know that the in-game benchmark does not actually present a very accurate real-world Scenario it runs quite a bit slower than you'd actually Expect from the game in the real world. So here are all the settings I'm running and Of note is the fact that again anti aliasing is off. It's a high-end game. It's a mid-range graphics card and the aliasing does not provide in my opinion enough of a gameplay benefit to sacrifice things like shadows and other details for it Okay, and I have turned physics on because unlike the other titles we've been looking at Mafia 2 is all about the physX support if you have an Nvidia card You better be running it with physX on because that's how you're gonna get the best gameplay experience All right, we're just finishing up the benchmark run here. You can see we've got an average of 33 frames per second So that's a little bit on the low side of what I would consider playable But yeah, it gives us a point of comparison against the other cards that we are going to be looking at today So here you go The performance is not optimal rank D as I mentioned before the actual in-game benchmark is a little bit on the slower side Compared to what you would experience playing the game. All right. These are my Arkham Asylum options in the control panel This is another Nvidia PhysX ready game so I've gone ahead and left hardware accelerated physics on it's set to normal Because we don't I mean they recommend really a dedicated physics card for the high setting Vsync is off everything else is as you see here Batman Arkham Asylum are ready to run Doing one more run of Mafia 2 one small change is that the apex physics are set to medium because I'm not running with GPU Physics anymore. I just wanted to do an apples to apples comparison against the 5770 just so that we Have one more point of reference here. It really is plain to see that this game is not Nearly as cool without the physics on high. I just thought I'd Do a quick clip here just to say my thoughts on it with the with the physics on medium running on the CPU You know the outdoor scene in particular You can't really notice it much in here, but not nearly as many Persistent particles not nearly as much damage and things like the building Just way way less interesting to watch So besides the less than stellar physics performance with it on medium running on the CPU the frame rate was quite a bit lower You So in conclusion I give it about a C plus that is my video review not the card itself I think I might just stick to the whole unboxings product showcases Gameplay videos simpler things like that because stringing together a complete review seems to be too complicated for me for whatever reason But anyway, let's talk a little bit about the conclusions about this card first of all. This is the cyclone cooler card I'm gonna have some separate videos coming up in the next little while where I'm gonna show some overclocking numbers. I'm gonna show some Acoustic numbers well not really numbers But some acoustic characteristics of it because really the test bench I had was far too loud for you to appreciate How quiet the card is so I have to put together a silent test bench so I can kind of do my whole here I'm gonna hold the camera close to the card You can see how quiet it is thing so that should be fine as far as the performance versus the price goes power consumption is slightly improved over the 460 series card and the price to performance ratio still looks quite good now. It's not quite a 5770 or 5750 killer, but I mean knowing Nvidia we're gonna see MIRs from their partners We're gonna probably see some IRs come into effect And I think that it will become a very very strong contender especially when you consider that it has features That you don't necessarily find on competing products I mean mafia 2 is a great example of a game that you really can enjoy on a GTS 450 I mean yeah, not to the same level as with a 460 but you can have a good experience with it at sub HD resolutions and With physX you really do get a better gameplay experience So I mean that's something to really bear in mind about a card like this. Thank you for checking out my I guess first attempt At a real video review and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips That was pretty much it. Oh, no one more thing Yes, if you want to get the best performance possible don't forget use the latest version of afterburner from MSI 2.0 that will give you all of the voltage adjustments that you can do on this card and also use the latest drivers from Nvidia their New 260 series drivers that will give you better performance on this as well as many other Fermi based cards