Date:
Monday , October 04, 2010
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Galaxy GeForce GTS 450 Super OC Overclocking

Galaxy's factory overclocked GeForce GTS 450 Super OC is up for a round of manual overclocking on our test bench today. We've evaluated performance in five of today's most popular games to see if this card brings anything new to the table, or if it is more of the same from the embattled GeForce GTS 450.

Introduction

When the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 launched, we did not find the video card to be adequately competitive. We found it to be simply too little, too late for it to be a viable competitor to the longstanding ATI Radeon HD 5770. However, it did show us some promising overclocking potential. Late into the evaluation cycle for our launch review of the GeForce GTS 450, we received a Galaxy GeForce GTS 450 Super OC video card. We looked at it briefly in the overclocking section of our launch evaluation, but we were unable to give it a thorough once-over due to time the constraints which typically accompany launch evaluations.

For this article, we will revisit the overclocking potential of the Galaxy GeForce GTS 450 Super OC and determine what, if any, performance advantages it brings to the table for a few of our games. We know that the out-of-the-box performance of this video card is quite similar to the MSI N450GTS Cyclone, so we won’t go into our usual Highest Playable Settings scenarios. Today, we are only concerned with overclocking performance.

Galaxy GeForce GTS 450 Super OC

Galaxy’s GTS 450 Super OC comes out of the box with the GPU core clocked to 888MHz, which is 105MHz higher than NVIDIA’s reference specification. That puts the shader core at 1.776GHz, since the shader clock speed is bound to the GPU clock speed with a 2:1 ratio. The GPU overclock is respectable, but it is not going to shatter any performance records. The memory on the Galaxy GTS 450 Super OC is set to 4.0GHz DDR. Compared to NVIDIA’s reference spec of 3.6GHz DDR, it is also not a tremendous increase.

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The Galaxy’s box is adorned by a large sticker indicating that this video card is the Super OC version with the "World’s 1st detachable fan." Another sticker indicates that this video card uses 0.4ns GDDR5 memory which is a unique feature and should increase its maximum theoretical clock rate and improve overclockability. The other graphics and text on the front of the box is pretty typical for what we’ve seen from Galaxy in the past. The back of the box contains a list of "8 good reasons why you should have a graphics card" ranging from "Better Looking Windows" to Blu-Ray, and 3D gaming. The information on the back is presented in both English and French, indicating that this video card is intended for the US and Canadian markets.

The bundle with this video card is quite spartan, but it is reasonable. Included is a driver CD-ROM, a dual 4-pin Molex to 6-pin auxiliary power adaptor, an installation guide, and a fan configuration guide.

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The video card itself is covered by a large, silver plastic shroud which covers a large aluminum heat-sink. In the center of the shroud is an 80mm cooling fan on a black plastic frame, which is removable to facilitate better cleaning of the heat sink and fan. There are no DVI to HDMI or VGA adaptors included, but this video card does sport a dual-link DVI port, an HDMI port, and a VGA port.

Test Setup

The test system we are using today is the same as what we used for the launch evaluation of the GeForce GTS 450. The motherboard is an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution, with an Intel Core i7 920 CPU overclocked to 3.6GHz and 6GB of Corsair DDR3-1600, all powered by a Cooler Master RealPower Pro 1250W PSU with a Western Digital 500GB SATA-II hard drive running Windows 7 Ultimate x64. We used NVIDIA’s Forceware driver package version 260.63 for Windows 7 x64.

For our performance comparisons, we are going to show a reference NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450, the Galaxy GeForce GTX 450 Super OC as it performs out of the box and the same Galaxy GTS 450 Super OC after we overclocked it as shown on the next page.