NVIDIA GTS 450 SLI – An Impressive Duet

In our previous article,  we were deeply impressed by the GeForce GTX 460 running in SLI. These two graphics cards leave the higher-end GTX 480 in the dust. This is good news for end users, of course, because we are provided with the chance to experience high-end performance without having to pay just as much.

NVIDIA then released an even more affordable series of GPU, the GeForce GTS 450, which offers remarkable performance for its price. However, the performance is still insufficient to run games with acceptable frame rates at higher resolutions such as 1920×1080. Adding another card for nearly double the processing power is one logical solution for this problem. We saw more than 90% performance improvement with the GTX 460 in SLI, so we have one question in mind: will two GTS 450 cards perform just as good?

Specification

	NVIDIA GTX 470	NVIDIA GTS 450
Codename	GF100	GF106
Fabrication Process	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	3.2 Billion	1.17 Billion
Die Size	–	–
Core Clock	607 MHz	783 MHz
Stream Processors	448	192
Shader Clock	1215 MHz	1566 MHz
Texture Units	56	32
ROPs	40	16
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Size	1280 MB	1024 MB
Memory Clock (effective)	3348 MHz	3608 MHz
Memory Interface	320-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	11	11
Shader Model	5	5
Power Connectors	2x 6-pin	6-pin
Min Recommended Power Supply	550 W	400 W
Bus Support	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16

SLI Configuration

To run two GeForce cards in SLI mode, you will need a pair of identical graphics card. Be sure that your motherboard provides at least two PCIe x16 slots and officially supports SLI. For Intel platform, SLI support is provided by the Intel Series 5 chipsets, while AMD users can use nForce based motherboards.

Use an SLI bridge like this one to connect the two GeForce cards.

At least two 6-pin PCIe power connectors are required to supply power to the GeForce cards.

After installing the driver, go to NVIDIA control panel and select the “Maximize 3D Performance” option to enable SLI mode.