The Card

Looking at the card, there's not much to it that you haven't seen before. In saying that, the whole design is a little different for the fan setup that Galaxy uses here, but for the most part there's very little difference.

The fan does flip out the same as we've seen from the last few Galaxy cards, which gives you the chance to clean the heatsink and the fan itself without voiding the warranty. It's quite a cool little feature; especially if your computer gets quite dusty.

As for the rest of the card, we've got a single 6-Pin PCI-E power connector, a single SLI connector letting you run up to two of these cards and in the I/O department we've got a single Dual-Link DVI, VGA and HDMI port.

Specifications

This is a Super OC model from Galaxy, so of course the card comes overclocked. Before we look at its particular clocks, though, let's first look at what the reference GTS 450 will offer.

Compared to the GTX 460 1GB which carries with it a 336 / 675MHz / 1350MHz / 3600MHz QDR CUDA Core / Core Clock / Shader Clock / Memory Clock setup on a 256-bit memory bus, the GTS 450 carries a 192 / 783MHz / 1566MHz / 3600MHz QDR setup on a 128-bit memory bus. The two big changes are of course the drop in CUDA Cores and the memory bus being cut in half, which is again lower than the 768MB GTX 460 which carries the same clocks as its 1GB brother, but only a 192-bit memory bus.

Galaxy has done a fairly good job on the clocks here, really upping the ante on some of them.

They've increased the core to 888MHz which in turn has increased the Shader to 1776MHz. As for the memory, they've moved from .5ns modules on the Super OC to .4ns and ramped the memory speed to a nice even 4000MHz QDR. While the core speed might seem a little weird, the number 8 is considered a lucky number in Chinese culture which is clearly the main reason Galaxy has opted for it.

The increase to .4ns memory over .5ns is one of the biggest stand out points from the Super OC variation, though, and it's really given them the ability to ramp up the memory clock.