 GTS 450, Nvidia is coming fast and hard filling out their DirectX 11 lineup. So they now have a mainstream part that's going to be around 149.99 Street. This is a 1Gig card featuring a cyclone cooler. So obviously with the cyclone cooler you might imagine it's made by... Da da da da... MSI. So the GTS 450 is meant to slot in under the GTS 460 as you might imagine. And really take the place in the price bracket that the GTS 250 used to occupy. So why don't we go around to the back of the card? Let's find out what is special about the cyclone version of this card. It has a 9cm PWM fan for 40% more airflow. It has multiple heat pipes, meaning two, for better heat dissipation. And it has a dust preventer design for longer fan lifespan. Okay, as I mentioned before this is a DirectX 11 card. Finally at a truly mainstream price point from Nvidia. And it features all of their latest technologies including CUDA, PhysX, SLI, 3D Vision. And the rest of these are not really Nvidia technologies, but they are also supported by the card. It is a PCI Express 2.0 card. It requires a 6-pin power connector and a minimum 400 watt power supply. So why don't we go ahead and open up the box? I'm actually filming this a while ago. I can't upload it until the embargo, so by the time you see this you will be able to buy this card. Let's have a look at the accessories that are included. It comes with a mini HDMI to HDMI normal sized adapter. Put that back in there. There we go. It comes with a 2 mole X to 1 PCIe 6-pin connector. Mind you, seriously guys, if you're not using a power supply with a PCI Express power adapter on it, or connector on it, like, really, just get one because they're not expensive. Okay, we got a DVI to VGA adapter just in case you're still using an ancient monitor. Now speaking of ancient monitor, this video card is perfect if you're using an ancient monitor. Because really, this price bracket of video cards is designed for around the 1280x1024 to 1680x1050 resolution range. If you're running a 24-inch monitor, do yourself a favor, buy a GTX 460. But if you're running a lower-res monitor, you want DirectX 11, you want the latest feature set from Nvidia, then this is a perfect choice. We also have a user's guide, a copy of MSI Afterburner, and we have......a little guide on how to use their live update online feature. Now let's look at the card itself. I have a feeling the cooler itself isn't going itself. See, I'm saying itself too much. The cooler is not going to surprise us too much because we have seen the Cyclone cooler before. MSI's Cyclone cooler is one of those value designs that performs really well, so everybody loves it. I can tell you from my experience working at NCIX that a lot of people have picked up the GTX 460 Cyclone because it really does make the GPU run cooler, it's quiet, and......it's cheap. I mean, what else can you ask for? MSI includes these little covers on all the connectors, so I'm just removing all of those so that I can actually show you the card in great detail. Now, I believe this card does use a reference PCB, and the reason I'm going to go ahead and assume that is because you can see right on the back there are actually blank spots where there are no RAM chips installed. So it looks like what we probably have on here is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 RAM chips for a total of 1 gig, and I am correct. You can see on the other side we've got an additional......yeah, an additional 4, and those two spots are also blank on the other side, so I guess it could support up to 1.5 gigs of RAM. So I wouldn't be too surprised to see a card, a GTX 450, with more RAM in the future, although I have to say there's probably not much benefit to loading up RAM on a card like this because it is a mainstream card. Here on the back we've got two DVI ports as well as a mini HDMI. We've got the typical MSI branding built into the PCI backplate. Now, it's not even terribly important that they have all this ventilation here because this is primarily an interior exhaust design. Which means you're not exhausting a ton of heat outside the case, but the benefit is that you do get to keep the GPU cooler. You get all of this incidental airflow going down over your RAM as well as onto your power circuitry here, and you do still get to exhaust a little bit of heat outside the case through the vents, but it's not going to be a ton. Power delivery is all right here at the back of the card. As I said before, I suspect this is a reference PCB, so you're not going to find anything exceptional in terms of power delivery, although for a mainstream card like this you don't really need anything exceptional. Here at the back of the card you find a 6-pin PCI Express power connector, and then you can see the fan is controlled via PWM. You know, I don't think I've ever talked about this before. No, no, stay, talk, look at the card, there we go. PWM means that there is a fourth pin. It's pulse width modulation, so what it means is it's only actually sending voltage to the fan every so often. Instead of actually decreasing the voltage to run slower and then increasing it to run faster, instead it just runs 12V all the time, but it does it in bursts. So the fan, if you're running 12V all the time, it'll spin fast, and if it does 12V 50% of the time, and then 50% of the time nothing, it'll spin slow. There you go, you learned something today if you didn't know how PWM fans work. At the back of the card we don't find anything particularly exceptional. We've got our PCI Express 16X interface, and... I'm a little confused. Look at this! I don't think I've ever seen this before. There's a great number of missing pins on the PCI Express 16X interface, and I don't know why. You know what? If we have any astute viewers out there, please let me know why it is missing the contacts here, because I have not seen that in the past. I'm sure there's a very good reason for it, but there you go, there's something I've never seen before. We do have an SLI connector up here at the top of the card. Remember, one SLI connector, that means two-way SLI only. No support for three-way SLI. Three-way SLI is only supported on the GTX 465 and up, not the 460, nothing below there, except the older generation stuff, you know, 275, etc., etc. And remember, four-way SLI is supported only on the 480. So that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the GTX 450 Cyclone. I'm also going to try and get some performance numbers going at some point today. Thank you for checking out this unboxing video, and thank you for subscribing to Linus Tech Tips. If you haven't subscribed to Linus Tech Tips, hit the subscribe button now. It's not that hard. Cameraman, no smart comments from you.