Introduction

While AMD are no doubt on the verge of releasing new models, from what we've been told the first set of cards that will be offered to us are designed to compete against one of the most well valued video cards on the market right now, known to us as the GTX 460.

For some the $200+ price tag associated with the model continues to be too much and the new GTS 450 we've looked at over the past month seems to be doing a good job of filling that low $100 bracket that users on a budget no doubt appreciate.

The latest version of the card comes from GIGABYTE and carries with it the two things we love most; an overclock and a fancy new cooler. What's missing on this particular one is a retail package, though, so instead of looking at that we'll get stuck straight into the actual card and then have a closer look at its specifications and the overclock that's on offer.

The Card

Sporting the dual fan Windforce cooler, the GIGABYTE GTS 450 looks like it's ready for some serious business. You can see for the most part it does a good job of covering up most of the PCB.

As for the rest of the card, there's not anything that you wouldn't have seen before. Towards the back of the card we've got a single 6-Pin PCI-E power connector, while across the top we have a single SLI connector. As for connectivity, we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors and a single mini HDMI connector.

Specifications

Like every other GTS 450 we've looked at, and as we mentioned in the introduction, the GIGABYTE version we're looking at is overclocked. By default the core clock is 785MHz, Shader Clock at 1566MHz and memory clock of 3600MHz QDR.

The GIGABYTE OC model comes with a 930MHz core and 1680MHz QDR Shader clock. As for the memory, that's pretty much at the standard clock rate, although slightly bumped up at 3608MHz QDR.