| NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 GF106 Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Olin Coles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 13 September 2010 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Page 21 of 24
VGA Power ConsumptionLife is not as affordable as it used to be, and items such as gasoline, natural gas, and electricity all top the list of resources which have exploded in price over the past few years. Add to this the limit of non-renewable resources compared to current demands, and you can see that the prices are only going to get worse. Planet Earth is needs our help, and needs it badly. With forests becoming barren of vegetation and snow capped poles quickly turning brown, the technology industry has a new attitude towards turning "green". I'll spare you the powerful marketing hype that gets sent from various manufacturers every day, and get right to the point: your computer hasn't been doing much to help save energy... at least up until now. For power consumption tests, Benchmark Reviews utilizes the 80-PLUS GOLD certified OCZ Z-Series Gold 850W PSU, model OCZZ850. This power supply unit has been tested to provide over 90% typical efficiency by Chroma System Solutions, however our results are not adjusted for consistency. To measure isolated video card power consumption, Benchmark Reviews uses the Kill-A-Watt EZ (model P4460) power meter made by P3 International. A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our test computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows-7 and rest idle at the login screen before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the login screen. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a chart with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product:
* Results are accurate to within +/- 5W.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 requires a single six-pin PCI-E power connection for proper operation. Resting at idle, the power draw consumed only 16 watts of electricity... 6W less than the ATI Radeon HD 5770, and half the amount required for the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, GTX 280, GTX 465 at idle. Once 3D-applications begin to demand power from the GPU, electrical power consumption climbed to full-throttle. Measured with 3D 'torture' load using FurMark, the GeForce GTS 450 consumed 122 watts, which nearly matches the Radeon 5770 yet still below the 8800 GT. Although GF106 Fermi GPUs features the same 40nm fabrication process as the GF100 part, it's clear that NVIDIA's GTS 450 is better suited for 'Green' enthusiasts.
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Comments
thanks for the review
We haven't been able to say this for a few years, but the NVIDIA cards are now the better deal.
Especially with the prices that they're coming in at.
1. Cuda
2. PhysX
3. Better/ easier driver installs/upgrades
4. A lot more stable drivers across the board
5. Ambient occlusion "in the driver update" new features w drivers
6. Folding superiority
7. Dual card scaling superiority, recently from good to outstanding
8. see #3 / no "mouse cursor disappears", no "cursor corruption" (seen since ati's all in wonder pci - a recurring issue for YEARS )
9. no dot net 2.0 requirements
10. superior control panel for a long, long time.
11. Since GTX200 series, LOTS of free software - including free 3d game Warmonger - works wonderfully with instant peer to peer gaming - destructive in game environment via PhysX.
12. Free Ray Tracing Design Garage since GTX200 = 400 series win7.
13. 2 frames 2 bucks and 2 watts
The question will be when AMD will drop prices on the 57XX and when the 6XXX will come to market. If the 6XXX comes Q1-2 NVIDIA could have a big problem but that's a big if.
The GTX 260 is not a DirectX-11 video card, which limits it to only half of the tests. Additionally, this isn't a 5770 review... it's a GTS 450 review. Nobody really cares how the GTX 260 compares with the 5770, and if they did, they could go read those reviews.
Here, I'll review for the great Lord, since I've seen 100 comparisons online, not certain where the great Lord has been, except perhaps in Oblivion.
The GTX260 is faster than the 5770, a bit more so than the 5770 has so far shown a slight advantage against the GTS450.
The deranged online pop culture fan community will scream the 450 competes with the 5750, as usual, pretending someone should listen to the free ati upgrade and nvidia downgrade, despite the available evidence. Do not be fooled, unless of course, you simply cannot help it.
If that's the case scream a few lies in reply.
I will probably have a few good replies but I tried to run ATI but the load times on my games was un-bearable and when ATI was contacted they could only tell me "they are addressing the issue in the next driver update." Sorry I don't have 3 months to wait around for driver fixes. I bought the product so fix it. Plus I remember not to long ago when the ATI 800 AIW came out about 2 months later vista came out and what did ATI do to its loyal fan base. Oh that's right no driver support for any AIW cards in Vista, not that Vista was a good OS to begin with. So those like me that bought the card for nearly $300 dollars were SOL.
Thanks to you I purchased the GTX 460 1GB, and it's a great card, if only I could get it to run Design Garage
It gives me a "not enough memory" error, bah!
Apart from that, just awesome performance for the $$
Anyone else run into this?
It's not that important really, but my old GTX 260 ran it fine with only 768 MB, go figure eh?
Thanks.