Gadgetory

since I first heard about the GTS 450 I thought it would be interesting to test this card because it is coming in at around a hundred US dollar price point I wanted to test it as a dedicated PhysX card so you can see I've got it configured here right now with the GTX 480 and then the GTS 450 because this is for physics and not for SLI there's no need to install any SLI bridges or anything like that and I am using a motherboard that has two PCIe 16x slots so that's all you really need for physics now when you want to configure a dedicated PhysX card all you do is go into the Nvidia control panel okay so you go into set physics configuration and then you select your physics processor so auto select would probably select the 450 but I've gone ahead and selected the 450 anyway you can see the other options would be to run physics on the 480 run it on the CPU which is low or run it on the 450 so then all you do is click apply and that's all there is to it so you can see here it says yeah this X is running here and then the display is running here so that's fairly straightforward so what I'm going to do is I'll do up a little graph with some benchmark results this is the same test bench I used for my GTS 450 review as well as my GTS 450 SLI review review and so I'm just going to go ahead and compare the 480 numbers I got without a dedicated PhysX card so while I was running physics on the on the 480 itself with adding the 450 to take a little bit of the load off it well I think based on the numbers the conclusion for this video is quite simple because you can see that a GTX 480 is a little over $500 after rebate I'm the NCIX site and then a GTS 450 is gonna run you about 120 $9.99 so you're adding about 25% more cost to your setup by adding a GTS 450 on top of the GTX 480 that in theory you already own but you also get about on average a twenty four point five percent improvement in performance so it's not actually very often on premium parts that you can pay an extra dollar to get an extra proportional amount of performance like usually you see a point of diminishing returns where you're spending you know twice as much but you're only getting you know one point five times the amount of performance so it's actually a pretty good value from that perspective but the drawback is that out of all of the games that I have here on my Steam account to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do I only have like two that support PhysX so it's one of those situations where yes as a best-case scenario a dedicated GTS 450 looks like a great value if you play games that are going to take advantage of it but if you don't play physics enabled games then you'd probably be better off saving your pennies to grab another 480 to run in SLI or finding some other way to increase the performance of your system so thanks for checking out my little mini review on using the GTS 450 as a dedicated PhysX processor