VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2010-11-25
The GTS 450 Low Profile from Palit is one of the most powerful cards meant for installing inside a HTPC, so we basically get of both worlds: a compact and silent system while surfing the internet or doing office work along with decent performances in todays' games, if using lower resolutions.
At first I would like to thank CaseKing.de and Palit for making a review of the Palit GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile video card possible.
"Established in 1988, Palit Microsystems Ltd. is well-known for manufacturing stable, excellent, and innovative graphics accelerators. As one of the top PC components manufacturers, Palit continues to provide top-to-bottom graphics cards with stable and excellent quality to the world. With main operation in Taipei, logistic center in Hong Kong, factories in Mainland China, and branch office in Germany, Palit has developed a worldwide sales network and cooperated closely with our customers.
Palit is well positioned to maintain an industry leadership due to the vast array of ATi and NVIDIA products and on-going development efforts. Palit’s worldwide facilities are ISO 9001 certified. All the Palit PC graphics accelerators and motherboards are with WHQL certification to ensure full compatibility."
Microsoft DirectX 11 Support
DirectX 11 GPU with Shader Model 5.0 support designed for ultra high performance in the new API’s key graphics feature, GPU-accelerated tessellation.
NVIDIA® GeForce® drivers
Unlock the full power and capability of your NVIDIA GeForce graphics processor. NVIDIA GeForce Drivers deliver continuous performance optimizations for the life of your GeForce GPU.
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Support
Expand your games in full stereoscopic 3D for the ultimate “inside the game” experience with the power of NVIDIA 3D Vision. NVIDIA 3D Vision automatically transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D.
NVIDIA® PhysX® Technology
Full support for PhysX technology, enabling a totally new class of physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience with GeForce.
NVIDIA® CUDA™ Technology
CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics simulation, ray tracing, and more, delivering incredible performance improvements over traditional CPUs.
Hardware Video Decode Acceleration
The combination of high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video.
TrueHD and DTS-HD Audio Bitstreaming Support
Full support for TrueHD and DTS-HD advanced lossless multi-channel HD audio codecs brings the rich sound of the master recording to your living room.
PCI Express 2.0 Support
Designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture offering the highest data transfer speeds for the most bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility with existing PCI Express motherboards for the broadest support.
Dual-link DVI Support
Able to drive industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays up to 2560x1600 and with support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
HDMI 1.4a Support
Support for HDMI 1.4a including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support (Blu-ray 3D playback requires the purchase of a compatible software player from CyberLink, ArcSoft, Corel, or Sonic), x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound will be added in a Release 260 driver. Upgrade your GPU to full 3D capability with NVIDIA 3DTV Play software, enabling 3D gaming, picture viewing and 3D web video streaming. See www.nvidia.com/3dtv for more details.
The GeForce GTS 450 Low Profile from Palit shares the same technical specifications as the reference model:
The mid-range GTS450 video cards have finally arrived in low profile format for HTPCs. If we look at low profile video cards that have appeared in the past, we can see that most of them brought very little performance improvement over the onboard solutions; with the Palit GTS 450, this is not the case.
Clocked at the same speeds as the reference model, the product brings full DirectX11 compatibility to the table, along with 1GB of GDDR5.
The GTS450 was mostly targeted at gamers that aim to get the best performance at the price they pay. Nvidia recommends its customers to use this card in games while using a resolution up to 1600x1200.
With this card, we have available 192 shader processors, and the available 1GB GDDR5 is linked to a 128-bit wide bus.
The Palit GTS 450 Low Profile comes with the standard clocks of 783/1566/902 (core/shaders/memory) and the power draw for these frequencies reported by Nvidia is 106W.
As we have stated earlier, the GTS 450 does come with 192 shader processors, divided between 4 Streaming Multiprocessors.
In Polymorph Engines that we can see in the diagram we can see the five stages:
-Vertex Fetch
-Tesselator
-Viewport Transform
-Attribute Setup
-Stream Output
These stages process the information from each Streaming Multiprocessor they are associated with. The data will then get to the Raster Engine which has 3-pipeline stages that pass data from current to the next.
In conclusion, we can find a total of 4 Polymorph Engines and 1 Raster Engine.
The latest GPUs from Nvidia fully support DirectX11 instructions which include GPGPU (DirectCompute 11), tessellation and improved multi-threading; they also come with Shader Model 5, better shadows and HDR texture compression.
# Tesselation, as described on the Unigine website, is a “scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality is vivified at your fingertips delivering engaging gaming experience.”
Here is a modeled house inside the Unigine Heaven benchmark, without and with the tessellation feature enabled:
The multi-threaded rendering is similar to the techniques applied for the current CPUs. If a shader or an instruction has to be queued up, the process creates a delay. The current GPUs can now process data completely threaded, which bring a better overall performance.
The DirectCompute feature allows access to the GPU for stream computing; it shares a range of computational interfaces with its competitors: OpenCL and CUDA.
3D Vision Surround and Nvidia Surround are the responses to ATI’s Eyefinity. Nvidia Surround allows the use of 3 separate monitors to be used in 3D applications, with an SLI setup. This feature is backwards compatible with GT200 and GF100 series and allows a maximum resolution of 2560x1600 per monitor.
The 3D Vision Surround offers stereoscopic viewing when using 3 monitors at once. To use this feature we also need three 120Hz displays, same model and same make to ensure uniformity; the system must be very powerful, because it needs to process six high-res 1920x1080 images, two images for each 120Hz monitor.
Delivering physics in games is no easy task. It's an extremely compute-intensive environment based on a unique set of physics algorithms that require tremendous amounts of simultaneous mathematical and logical calculations.
This is where NVIDIA® PhysX™ Technology and GeForce® processors come in. NVIDIA PhysX is a powerful physics engine which enables real-time physics in leading edge PC and console games. PhysX software is widely adopted by over 150 games, is used by more than 10,000 registered users and is supported on Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PC.
In addition, PhysX is designed specifically for hardware acceleration by powerful processors with hundreds of cores. Combined with the tremendous parallel processing capability of the GPU, PhysX will provide an exponential increase in physics processing power and will take gaming to a new level delivering rich, immersive physical gaming environments with features such as:
* Explosions that cause dust and collateral debris
* Characters with complex, jointed geometries for more life-like motion and interaction
* Spectacular new weapons with incredible effects
* Cloth that drapes and tears naturally
* Dense smoke & fog that billow around objects in motion
The only way to get real physics with the scale, sophistication, fidelity and level of interactivity that dramatically alters your entertainment experience will be with one of the millions of NVIDIA PhysX-ready GeForce processors.
Nvidia PhysX sample videos from Youtube:
NVIDIA® CUDA™ is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) to solve many complex computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a CPU. It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the parallel compute engine in the GPU. To program to the CUDATM architecture, developers can, today, use C, one of the most widely used high-level programming languages, which can then be run at great performance on a CUDATM enabled processor. Other languages will be supported in the future, including FORTRAN and C++.
With over 100 million CUDA-enabled GPUs sold to date, thousands of software developers are already using the free CUDA software development tools to solve problems in a variety of professional and home applications – from video and audio processing and physics simulations, to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research.
Technology features :
* Standard C language for parallel application development on the GPU
* Standard numerical libraries for FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines)
* Dedicated CUDA driver for computing with fast data transfer path between GPU and CPU
* CUDA driver interoperates with OpenGL and DirectX graphics drivers
* Support for Linux 32/64-bit and Windows XP 32/64-bit operating systems
The GTS 450 Low profile video card from Palit is packed in a little cardboard box which shows in front a big engine with the company logo in the center; also here we can see the product supported technologies (SLI is also listed but not supported by this particular product), the name of the product and the total video memory quantity:
On one of the box sides, we can see even more logos, along with the Palit frog mascot:
The back of the box holds additional information in multiple languages (technical specifications), along with the minimum system requirements:
The box is sealed on the box sides, to avoid unauthorized access inside:
Inside the external box we can find another internal cardboard one, for additional protection:
The card is located in the center of the box, surrounded by cardboard and it is also fully wrapped in a plastic bubble bag:
Along with the card, inside the box we can also find a Quick Installation Guide, a CD with drivers, a PCI-Express to MOLEX adapter in case we have ran out of 6-pin PCI-Express connectors from our power supply and a shield:
Inside the Quick Installation Guide, we can find instructions on how to install the drivers located on the CD, along with hints on how to install the card inside our computer:
Being a low profile video card, the Palit GTS 450 occupies very little space in our case and the cooling system is designed in such a way that it evacuates all the hot air out of the computer:
In the back of the card, we can see the 4-pin fan connector, along with the 6-pin PCI-Express power header:
The high RPM fan comes with the Palit logo on top:
On one of the card laterals, we can see a yellow warning sticker which informs us not to touch the aluminium heatsink while the card is operating, because it will be very hot:
On the back of the card, we can see the red PCB (which can be found mostly on AMD video cards), along with the memory chips and screws used to fix the cooling system on the top of the card:
The memory chips are Samsung K4G10325FE-HC05 GDDR5 and run at 902MHz:
On one of the screws that keeps the top heatsink in place we can see a sticker that prevents its removal; if this sticker is damaged, the warranty will be void:
The GPU heatsink screws have springs and washers, to avoid scratching the back of the PCB surface:
The card comes preinstalled with the low profile shield, which must be replaced in order to be able to insert the card into the test bench computer; the card does have a DVI and a HDMI output connector:
If we remove the shield, we can easily disassemble the top plastic shroud, to see how the heatsinks do look like; the GPU heatsink is massive and it gets cooled by the air crossing through the plastic duct:
Even if it is very little, the VRM is also passively cooled by a small heatsink; between the aluminium heatsink and the VRM we can find thermal pads:
The high RPM fan is manufactured by Power logic and is rated DC 12V, 0.30A, Model PLB05020B12H:
Here is how the card does look without the shield installed; we can observe that the top screws will be inserted into plastic, so we must not over-tighten them to avoid breaking the shroud:
After installing the shield, the card is ready to be inserted in the test bench:
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Stefan's Test Setup
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| CPU | Core i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz |
| Cooling | Cogage True Spirit |
| Mainboard | Asrock X58 Extreme |
| Memory | G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series |
| VGA |
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| Other |
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With the help of the GPU-Z 0.4.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
AIDA64 can offer us even more information about the video card, along with the clocks in different power states:
Here are the GTS 450 CUDA capabilities:
To find out the IDLE and maximum temperatures, I have used the Furmark utility, with the Stability Test in “Xtreme Burning mode” and let it run for about 15 minutes. To record the temperatures, the GPU-Z utility was used, thanks to its Sensors monitoring tab. The recorded room temperature at the time of testing was 21.4 degrees Celsius:
IDLE
Full Load
Before measuring the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 29.1dBA (with everything turned off).
The next step was to measure the noise the test system was producing, without the video card installed; the value I have obtained was 34.1dBA. Most of the fans inside the case were turned off, but the CPU (43%) and chipset one (30%).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 8cm under the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the EVGA Precision software:
The noise obtained at 80% speed was higher than the one obtained at 90%, simply because at that speed, the shield started to vibrate (noise which was not present by the fan at 90%). The board BIOS did not permit climbing the fan up to 100% speed or going under 30%.
When we will insert the CD into the drive, we will have the options to install drivers, DirectX or Badaboom, which is a blazingly fast media converter that formats video files for a variety of devices, including iPod, PSP, iPad, and YouTube, by using the system's graphics processing unit (GPU):
The 3DMark Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores.
Here are the Vantage subscores separately:
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
Compared to the previously tested low profile video card, the Sparkle GTS 250, this one was not downclocked, but was functioning at the recommended Nvidia stock clocks.
I have appreciated the inclusion of the low profile bracket along with the standard one, for us to be able to use the card in small HTPC cases.
The high speed fan can be no doubt heard in 3D applications, depending on the load levels, but in 2D office work or high definition movies, the card remains silent. The hot air is exhausted out of the case, which is a good thing considering that HTPC enclosures are not very big and if the air is recirculated, all the components inside would get more than warm.
By installing this card in a HTPC, we can boost it in terms of 3D performance and can even play the latest DX11 titles (with lower resolutions like 1600x1200). The card performance is very near to the Inno3D GTS 450 tested previously, which has a small factory overclock. The Palit card is easy to clean up if dust accumulates inside: we simply have to remove the two screws from the shield and another two little screws from the back of the card; the plastic shroud is then easy to remove, to be able to access the aluminium heatsink.
Palit Geforce GTS 450 Low Profile Recommended for HTPC Users
The low profile GTS 450 from Palit costs about 10 Euros more than the stock clocked standard sized card, 109,9 EUR. That said, the Palit GTS 450 is the most powerful low profile video card to date in low profile format, so it is definitely a recommended product for HTPC users if 3D performance inside a small case is a priority.
I would like to thank again to CaseKing.de and Palit for making this review possible.
