The Card

The card itself is very similar to the GTX 460 we looked at from Palit. Overall the heatsink/fan is a little boring, but to be honest, it's done the job well which is what you really need from a video card cooler. As for other bits and pieces connected to the PCB, we've got a single 6-PIN PCI-E power connector and a single SLI connector across the top.

The I/O department doesn't show us anything we haven't seen before from Palit. What's interesting is that the three cards we've looked at so far have all had a different setup. Galaxy opted for a Dual-Link DVI, VGA and HDMI; MSI two Dual-Link DVIs and a mini HDMI and here Palit have gone the two Dual-Link DVI, VGA and HDMI path. No doubt Palit has the largest array of ports of the three and something worth considering when looking at the GTS 450.

Specifications

Just quickly I'll cover the fact that the reference clocks for the GTS 450 are 783MHz on the core, 1566MHz on the Shader and 3600MHz QDR on the memory clock. For a little more detail on the card's specifications, I would recommend checking out the Galaxy Super OC review.

As to why Palit was greeted with a nice "Holy Crap!" message from me, it's because out of the box they're offering us a mammoth 930MHz core clock. 930MHz! When we tested the MSI one for overclocking, we achieved only 20MHz more than that. It's just insane to see a company offer us such a big OC that's so close to what we've seen cards overclock to.

What that's done is pushed our Shader clock to 1860MHz. I'm just glad that Palit hasn't chosen to rely on that core clock, though, and have instead chosen to increase the memory speed to 4000MHz QDR like we've seen from both Galaxy and MSI so far.