Gadgetory

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 140 999 Street this is a one gig card featuring a cyclone cooler so obviously with the cyclone cooler you might imagine it's made by that vanilla MSI so the GTS 450 is meant to slot in under the GTX 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 nine centimeter pwm fan for 40% more airflow it has multiple heat pipes meaning two for a 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 add 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 part 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 two molex to one PCIe 6 pin connectors mind you seriously guys if you're not using a power supply with the PCI Express power adapter on it or connector on it like really just get one because they're not expensive okay we've 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 video cards is designed or around the 1280 by 1024 to 1680 by 1050 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 so yeah I'm saying itself too much the cooler is not going to surprise us too much because we have seen the cyclone color 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 gonna go ahead and assume that it's 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 one two three four five six seven eight RAM chips for a total of one gig and I am correct you can see on the other side we've got an additional yeah an additional four 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 GTS 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 to 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 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 of events 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 gonna 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 by a PWM you know I don't think I've ever talked about this before no no it's state thought we 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 12-volt all the time but it does it in bursts so the fan if you're running 12-volt all the time it'll spin fast and if it does 12 volt 50% of the time and then 50% of the time nothing it'll spin slow there you go you learn 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 uh 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 Todd 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 3-way SLI 3-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 4 Way SLI is supported only on the 480 so that pretty much covers everything I wanted to say about the GTS 450 cycle and I'm also gonna 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 line detectives hit the subscribe button now it's not that hard cameraman no smart aleck comments from you