MSI N450GTS Cyclone 1GD5 – Good Performance, Excellent Cooler

The GeForce GTS 450 offers dependable performance at a relatively low price (US$129). It’s not nearly as powerful as the other GTX 400 series of GPUs from NVIDIA, but the GTS 450 still has enough processing power to provide adequate frame rates in modern games at resolutions lower than 1920×1080. As such, it provides an interesting alternative for the vast majority of computer gamers, especially here in Indonesia where people aren’t that willing to spend big bucks on higher end gaming systems.

Graphics card manufacturers have been coming up with their own GTS 450 products. We have previously tested the Sonic Platinum version from Palit, and now we have MSI’s N450GTS Cyclone 1GD5. Like many other GTS 450s, it comes factory overclocked (at 850 MHz core frequency). How much better it is compared to the standard version? Let’s have a specs comparison before moving on to the tests.

Specification

	NVIDIA GTS 450	MSI N450GTS Cyclone 1GD5
Codename	GF106	GF106
Fabrication Process	40 nm	40 nm
Transistors	1.17 Billion	1.17 Billion
Die Size	–	–
Core Clock	783 MHz	850 MHz
Stream Processors	192	192
Shader Clock	1566 MHz	1700 MHz
Texture Units	32	32
ROPs	16	16
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Clock (effective)	3608 MHz	4000 MHz
Memory Interface	128-bit	128-bit
DirectX Version	11	11
Shader Model	5	5
Power Connectors	6-pin	6-pin
Min Recommended Power Supply	400 W	400 W
Bus Support	PCIe 2.1 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16

MSI’s N450GTS Cyclone 1GD5 has everything a standard GTS 450 has, plus a higher core frequency of 850 MHz, about 67 MHz higher than reference standard. Shader clock was automatically increased to 1700 MHz, along with the higher core clock. The memory chips are also overclocked to 4000 MHz effective frequency. The factory overclocks are nothing too impressive, but still a nice improvement nonetheless.

Sales Package and Contents

These are the front and back sides of the package box. The “Cyclone” heatsink is pictured on the front.

An internal Styrofoam packaging protects the graphics card and keeps it in a fixed position.

We found a Manual Book, a Quick User’s Guide, a Driver Disc, a Molex to 6-pin power connector, along with a DVI to D-sub, and mini-HDMI to HDMI converters. Thanks to the mini-HDMI to HDMI converter, you can plug any HDMI display to this graphics card without first having to buy an additional converter.