Review of ASUS GTS 450 DirectCU Silent: Gamer VGA Without Requiring Additional Power

GeForce GTS 450, graphics card with a GF106 chip Fermi first-generation GPU can indeed be said to be already quite old. NVIDIA introduced a value mainstream class of graphics card is about a year ago and get a positive response by consumers. Besides being able to process graphics with DirectX 11 technology, the applications and the latest games, the main attraction of this graphics card is the price / performance offered is quite friendly for most gamers. This graphics card requires no extra fast system with an extra big PSU to run it like any other gamer-class graphics card.

Although today NVIDIA has released the successor of the GTS 450 with GTX 550 Ti, some graphics card manufacturers still seems having enough trust the graphics cards that they make with this chip GF106. Like the graphics card test in JagatReview lab this time, the GTS 450 DirectCU Silent from ASUS.

ASUS GTS 450 DirectCU Silent

Specification

There are some interesting things offered by ASUS for this GTS 450 DirectCU. ASUS has been to modify the design of a standard GTS 450 graphics card as efficiently as possible so that these can be run without a power / auxiliary power again (PCIE Power). Of course it will be very attractive to consumers who are planning to build a Green PC power saving. But of the power reduction, of course there is “a price to be paid” the reduction of “raw power”. ASUS lower clock and memory that has to be 594/3200 MHz with GDDR3 memory from the default specification GTS 450 783/3608 MHz with GDDR 5.

How much eco-friendly graphics card that can give a performance? Before we examine it further, we see the product gallery of ASUS GTS 450 this DirectCU Silent.

Platform Review: ASUS GTS 450 DirectCU Silent

• Processor : Intel Core i7 930 @4 GHz (200×20)
• Motherboard : LGA1366 Chipset Intel X58+ICH10R
• Graphics Card : NVIDIA GTX 500 & GTX 400 Series, AMD HD 6000 & HD 5000 Series
• Memory : 3x 2GB Kingston HyperX blu. (@1600 MHz; 1.64 V)
• Storage : Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 64 GB, Kingston SSDNow V Series 30 GB
• Power Supply : Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 800 Watt
• CPU Heatsink : Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus
• Monitor : LCD Monitor 1920×1080
• Input : Genius (Keyboard and Mouse)
• OS : Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
• Driver : Catalyst 11.6; Forceware 275.33

Packaging and Package Sales

ASUS typical packaging with the Knight/Samurai Warrior that looks dashing.

Some of the uniqueness of this graphics card among others is fanless graphics and unplugged graphics card which means it can work without requiring additional external power from the PSU.

The back packaging shows some features that carried of this graphics card, such as the use of overvoltage with ASUS’s VoltageTweak applications.

Sales package provided only a CD Driver, Manual book with it.