Hi Everyone, today we are taking a look at the GTS 450 from the guys at Sparkle Computer Corp. Now for those who don’t know Sparkle has been around since 1982 in Taiwan, making them well known around the globe and for slightly over a year now, they are beginning to leave their mark in the USA. Now what I like about Sparkle is the fact that they can keep their prices low on most their products and they hae 2 different lines to choose from.

Their standard Graphics card lines which follow NVIDIA’s naming rule and then their Calibre performance lines which has more upgraded cooling as well as better clock setting for the GPU. Now the cards we received today are part of their standard line but has a few modifications compared to other vendors who tend to use NVIDIA’s stock coolers. Now the GTS 450 is NVIDIA’s lowest price Fermi card to date with performance and is focused directly at gamers on a budget.

Specifications:

Core Clock:

789MHz

Shader Clock:

1579MHz

Stream Processors:

192 Processor Cores

Effective Memory Clock:

3760MHz

DirectX:

DirectX 11

HDMI:

1 x Mini-HDMI 1.4a connector

DVI:

2 x DVI

NVIDIA really wanted to alow gamers to understand what segment of the market their graphics card fits into, which is why they associated their cards with gaming characters. Currently there are three types “Tank”, “Hunter” and “Sniper” classes. The GTS 450 fits into the sniper class and is so because it is not the biggest, most powerful GPU available, but it is precision that will yield great mainstream results. Now lets take a closer look at the card its self.

Okay, so what’s included in the box at purchase? Well, let’s take a look.

As you can see, it comes with the usual – from manual, drivers, DVI to D-Sub, to PCIe power adapter (Molex connector to PCI-e power) – and now, you even get an HDMI Cable.

This card comes with two Dual Link DVI and a single mini-HDMI port. The GTS 450, like the GTS 460, includes bit streaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS HD Master Audio over HDMI. Which means if you use this card in an HTPC and use your 3D Vision kit you can see Blu-Ray in full 1080p stereoscopic 3D.

Test Bench:

Processor

Intel Core i7 920 OC to 3.65GHz

Motherboard

MSI X58 ECLIPSE SLI

Memory

4GB DDR3 1600 Mushkin memory

Hard drive

750GB Hard drive

Opticle

Sony DVDRW

Power Supply

Sparkle 1250w

OS

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

And most importantly 2 GTS 450 Cards.

Benchmarks:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:

•In Game settings to Maximum•4xAA•16xAF•Fraps measured Gameplay

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3DMARK Vantage:

· Settings (each preset): Default Testing

Test Results:

The performance of the GTS 450 speaks for itself. It offers budget performance when you play games at resolutions between 1280×1024 and 1680×1050 and leaves a little left over if you move up to 1920×1200.Overall, this video card was able to perform extremely well. Even when using a simple system setup I was able to obtain great Benchmark results. This is way more than your average graphics card, this is extreme graphics, on a budget and you will be amazed on the level of realism it portrays on your screen. Especially with Sparkle video cards having one of the lowest prices available.