The Card

Looking at the card, it looks all too familiar. The Cyclone cooler isn't anything new to us; it's clearly a working model for MSI, though, so what's the point in changing to something else? We're a huge fan of the cooler. As for the rest of the card, like the Galaxy we have the single 6-Pin PCI-E connector and single SLI connector.

What differs is the connectivity on offer. While Galaxy opted for a Dual-Link DVI / VGA / HDMI setup, MSI have gone a more traditional twin Dual-Link DVI setup and added a mini HDMI port that we've seen on a few NVIDIA models lately. Fortunately, MSI was also kind enough to include a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter in the bundle, so if you're using HDMI, you'll be able to use it straight out of the box.

Specifications

As we mentioned in the introduction, being part of the Cyclone series means that the card is of course overclocked. While we won't go into too much detail about the reference GTS 450 as we covered it a bit in our Galaxy GTS 450 Super OC review, we will say that the reference clocks for the model are 783MHz on the core, 1566MHz on the Shader and the 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus comes in at 3600MHz QDR.

The MSI one comes in with an 850MHz core; this in turn has bumped the Shader clock up to 1700MHz. Unlike the Cyclone version of the GTX 460, MSI have chosen to bump the memory clock up in this case to 4000MHz QDR. This is a really nice overclock from MSI and should yield some good performance.