Call this the littlest Fermi. The Asus ENGTS450 is built on Nvidia’s GTS 450 GPU, a scaled-down version of Nvidia’s flagship architecture. The GTX 450 is its own chip, not a feature-reduced version of a large GPU. Asus’s GTS 450 card includes only a single dual-link DVI connector, plus VGA and HDMI outputs; only two can be simultaneously active. This is a newer design than the XFX HD 5770, launched in September 2010.
The Asus card wins in seven of 12 total benchmarks, while scoring five wins out of nine game tests. Idle power draw proved lower, too, although the Radeon GPU was more efficient under load. Note that the GTS 450 GPU is Nvidia’s first design to properly support full multichannel HDMI audio pass-through properly. While the HD 5770 offers some intriguing features, we’ll call this a TKO for the Asus card.
Note that in many games, you’ll still need to dial down resolution and graphics settings, particularly on bleeding-edge titles. That’s the trade-off with a sub-$150 card over the pricier spread.
Reasonable gaming performance; efficient power consumption at idle; voltage tweak utility included.
A VGA port? Really?
| Asus ENGTS450 | |
|---|---|
| Shader Units* | 192 |
| Texture Units | 32 |
| ROPs | 16 |
| Power Connectors | 1 x 6-pin |
| Core Clock | 783MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1,566MHz |
| GDDR5 Memory Clock | 900MHz |
| GDDR5 Frame Buffer | 1GB |
| Memory Interface | 128-bit |
| Asus ENGTS450 | |
|---|---|
| 3DMark 2011 | 2,486 |
| 3DMark Vantage | 11,498 |
| Unigine Heaven 2.1 (fps) | 14 |
| Crysis (fps) | 15 |
| Battle Forge (fps) | 26 |
| Far Cry 2 (fps) | 52 |
| F1 2010 (fps) | 28 |
| HAWX 2 (fps) | 67 |
| Metro 2033 (fps) | 9 |
| STALKER: CoP (fps) | 23 |
| Just Cause 2 Concrete Jungle (fps) | 23 |
| Aliens vs. Predator (fps) | 16 |
| Power @ idle (W) | 127 |
| Power @ full throttle (W) | 257 |
Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition in an Asus P6X58D Premium motherboard with 6GB of DDR3/1333 and an 850TX Corsair PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA.
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