Introduction

We've already had a chance to look at one GTS 450 and it managed to do a good job impressing us. While Galaxy chose to push the price higher than what we'll see other variants of the model come in at, they did choose to ramp up the clock speeds on the card.

The Cyclone series has always been about the cooler, but also offers an overclock. While generally not the highest clocked series in the MSI line up, it's not the most expensive one either. Dialing back both the clocks and the price, it'll be interesting to see how the model fairs, especially when it comes to overall performance and value.

We wonder if it's worth saving some money with a slightly lower clocked card or if you should just spend the extra dollars associated with a version like the Super OC from Galaxy. Before we get right into that, we'll first see what's going on with the package before we take a closer look at the card, and more importantly, the clock speeds MSI decided on.

Let's not delay any longer and just get into it.

The Package

Like the Galaxy version, and just most video cards in general these days, there's not a whole lot going in the package. As far as what we've got, there's a manual, quick user guide, driver CD with Afterburner, dual Molex to 6-Pin connector, DVI to VGA connector and a mini HDMI to HDMI connector. Nothing to get all that excited about; not really much of a surprise, though, as we already mentioned.