Gadgetory

so this video is meant to be a few things first of all it is meant to be as somewhat of a review of the PNY GeForce GT s 450 that I did unbox a little while back okay it is also meant to be a look at SLI performance with the PNY GTS 450 as well as the MSI cyclone GTS 450 now these are both very similar cards I'm going to stop holding up the box and instead I'm actually going to hold up the PNY card itself now they're quite similar cards you can actually see now that we have them side-by-side they do use the same reference PCB design okay so the biggest difference is the cooler we did a cooler comparison but remember these cards will work just fine an SLI mode so that's what we were able to benchmark them in so I want you to have a look at my test bench here and I'm just going to show you what I was using for this particular little video review I've got a Core i7 860 running at 3.8 gigahertz down there and that is with hyper-threading on all right I've got 4 gigs of kingston hyperx h2o ram don't even bother trying to look at that it's way in the back it looks like this I have a third stick here ok so that's what that looks like alright then we've got an a' seuss motherboard which is both SLI and crossfire compatible which was necessary for the testing today and this is all running off in ocz vertex series SSD all right so let's have a look at all the cards that we run with today you can see we've got the GTX 480 in there as a reference point okay we've got the 5870 as a reference point as well so the whole point today was to see how does to mid range or really value performance cards like the 450 or the 57 70 so you can see we've tested with a single as well as with dual 57 70s as well how does two more mid-range cards compared to a single high-end card from each vendor and then how does the Nvidia offering compared to the ATI offering I also threw in the GTX 460 cyclone Edition because I did have it on hand and it's such a popular card right now I figured ok well that'll be a good reference point for people as well so stay tuned I'm going to do boring benchmark laughs and before then I'm going to show you all the settings I was using in the games that we did test one of the games we tested obviously Crysis is still a benchmark for optimal system performance under incredible load if it can run Crysis really well then typically it can run most games fairly well although that is changing there are some fairly demanding games coming out these days we're running at 1680 by 1050 which is a perfectly reasonable resolution for our mainstream level cards but what you'll discover when we show you the graphics benchmarks the benchmark numbers is that some of the higher end cards do start to get CPU bottlenecked at that resolution and we don't see scaling even with more impressive graphics cards again once again this is mainstream cards that were mostly having a look at so I'm using all of the medium presets for crisis here's the settings we used for mafia 2 but I do want you to note one thing the apex physics engine here is off because I do have a Radeon card on the platform right now but I did run it two separate ways for all the Nvidia cards I ran it once with Apex physics on high and then once with it off so the only time I'm going to compare against Radeon cards is with physics off but it should be noted that this game does have substantial gameplay innovations that rely on physics that really you're not getting the ideal experience from unless you have physics on Madden Arkham Asylum yeah I know this game is not that new but frankly I don't care I really enjoyed it so I'm going to go ahead and benchmark it all so it serves as a reference point as an unreal 3 engine game so that allows us to find out how these cards will compare against each other in a pretty wide variety of games so these are the settings that we did use and you can see once again here I have hardware accelerated physics off but I had it set to high with the supported Nvidia cards and so what I'll do is I'll show you again two points of comparison one with physics off with all of the cards in the mix and then one with high with only the Nvidia cards you so in conclusion that was my second video review and I had so many people requesting it I couldn't help but do more I guess there's not really too much to say I mean you've seen the numbers already and really the prices haven't really haven't settled enough for the GTS 450 Series cards to really make a clear recommendation in terms of FPS per dollar or some kind of a hard-line measurement but well we can see is that the cards do scale quite well in SLI they do perform quite well for their price point and if you want to check it out here I just hope you've all enjoyed this review of the PNY GTS 450 as well as these sli running review I mean I guess it's uh it's more of a review of both of these cards than only one but I hope you've enjoyed it and I also wanted to make a special note here in the conclusion that I totally forgot about before I am running the absolute latest driver revisions for all of these cards so that means the latest to 60 download from the Nvidia website as well as catalyst 10.9 for all of the ATI cards so these are pretty much the most up-to-date numbers that you can get for any of these cards don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips and I hope you've enjoyed our video review