Shootouts

GeForce GTS 450 Roundup Part 2 - New Additions Reviewed

By Kenny Yeo - 15 Oct 2010

Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking

Temperature

It is often said that size doesn’t matter, but it’s apparent in our temperature testing that sometimes does hold true. As our graphs show, the ECS GTS 450 Black with its massive custom cooler from Arctic Cooling recorded a scarcely believable 39 degrees Celsius. In comparison, the other four GeForce GTS 450 that we have rounded up all recorded above 60 degrees Celsius. And the low profile Palit card with its compact candy bar cooler, recorded the highest temperature of 77 degrees Celsius.

 

 

Power Consumption

Power readings of all five cards were more or less inline with our expectations. Although all cards recorded comparable readings at idle, the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 450 OC stood out for its slightly higher than average reading at load, which is not entirely surprisingly given its high clock speeds. In the same vein, the reference clocked Palit GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile recorded the lowest power draw readings at load amongst all the GeForce GTS 450 cards. 

 

Overclocking

The GF106 chip is an eager overclocker and our collection of cards did admirably in our overclocking tests, and taking top honors was the ECS GTS 450 Black. With its massive cooler and cool operating temperature, we managed to run the ECS GTS 450 Black stably at a full 1000MHz at the core and 4400MHz DDR at the memory. This gave us a considerable 5561 3DMarks, an improvement of 16%.

Another noteworthy mention was the EVGA card, because despite sporting a simple, reference-looking cooler, the card was able to run comfortably at 990MHz at the core and 4200MHz DDR, recording 5451 3DMarks in the process.

Seeing that the low profile Palit card recorded the highest operating temperatures in our earlier temperature test, it wasn’t surprising to find that it only managed 930MHz at the core and 4000MHz DDR. It’s some ways off the mark compared to the other cards, but all things considered, its actually a decent result for a low profile, half-height card. 

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