The Zotac GeForce GTS450
Graphics CardI recently perches one of these cards and added it to my build computer
The price of the card at PCWorld was £138 which for what was claimed
the card could do seemed cheap and the 460 card was only £10 more.
The main reason I went for the GTS450 is that it needed only one
six pin PCI Express supplementary power connector
were as the 460 needed two.
Although my machine could run ether and has a good air flow through
the case so running temperature would not be a problem I could not see the point
of using that much power if it's not needed.
After all just because it's more expensive don't mean it is a better card if you read the
stats of both cards there is not a lot of difference to warrant the extra power.
As I was using an ATX card I went for a total re-install.
I have Windows 7 64Bit version running which is a good test for any Graphics card.
After the initial install the updates started flooding in one of which I noticed was an
update for the 450 card then it was time for the restart.
Once restarted I went to the system control in the control panel and selected
the system rating feature which gave me the Window Experience index
and what a lot of people don't realise it also sets the best setting your
Computer can run at.
I then returned to the desk top and "BAM" take a look at the colours now showing
and the faultless clarity of the desktop picture.
Apart from the fact the speed of the computer had also increased as it seemed less
ram had been set aside but hey lets load up some games and try it out.
Silent Hunter 3 now looked outstanding great but what about frame rate
The living Silent hunter 3v5 is the mod running so lets start a mission
running. Ok sailing through port the frame rate is showing 50
and no stutters what so ever.
And now out in open sea it is showing 160 great.
Silent Hunter 5 Lets turn everything on max and see what happens
sailing out of port stunning to say the least no stutters at all
out at sea breath taking didn't even think about frame rate.
So for me this card is a winner so I give it 9/10
(why only 9/10 because I had to pay for it
)
Ok now for the boring bit
Microsoft Direct 11 support ... Nvidia CUDA Technology with CUDA C/C++
Directcomputer 5.0 and openCL support .... Nvidia physX technology .... Nvidia
SLI Ready .... Nvidia 3D vision technology .... Hardware Decoder accelerator ....
PCI express 2.0 support .... OpenGL 4.0 support
Power supply of 400x minimum or above with a six pin extra power supply lead
if you don't have this lead there is a two four pin lead into six pin so you
will need two spare four pin leads.
