Introduction

SLI, CrossFire and just multi card setups in general have held little value over the past few years. But while it hasn't really changed for AMD, it has for NVIDIA; the GTX 400 series has brought with it some exceptional value when it comes to SLI and the main reason for that is NVIDIA has done an exceptional job lately when it comes to increasing the scaling ability with two cards.

We had always hoped that adding a second card into the mix would carry gains of almost 100% and these days we're almost there with 100% gains; in some cases even being met in certain games.

When we started to throw overclocking into the mix, we really began to see some great value from the GTX 470 when in SLI. Some extra voltage and a nice bump in clocks saw the model perform exceptionally well. Jump forward to the GTX 460 and you're getting amazing performance out of the model in SLI; especially when you're talking about setups costing easily under $500. The setup kills the GTX 480 in performance and at the same time offers us support for Surround Vision.

Today it's time to find out how the GTS 450 goes in this configuration. It's got the price, but has it got the performance?

Setting up SLI

Setting up SLI is really a breeze these days. We slot both cards in, run the install suite for the drivers and once we've rebooted into Windows we open the NVIDIA control panel and enable SLI. Once that's done we just double check in GPU-Z and as you can see on the bottom line, SLI is enabled.