ECS GeForce GTS 450 1GB Black Video Card

Introduction

The Black Series from ECS is quickly becoming a bit of a personal favorite thanks to the massive Arctic Cooling cooler that the company implements on the series. And while it does take up three slots, for so many people it's not that big of a deal with people using onboard sound and networking these days, and most still avoiding dual card setups.

Since we've looked at a few GTS 450s already, I figured we'd look at this one a little differently. What we saw from the Black version of the GTX 460 was one of the higher clock speeds when it came to overclocking. We've got our fingers crossed the same kind of clock speeds will be achieved on the GTS 450.

So while we won't be testing the standard clock speeds today, we will be testing the overclocked ones we can achieve. While normally in an OC article we would avoid the package and card, because we haven't actually looked at the ECS GTS 450 Black yet, we'll be including that information today. So let's get into the package and card before we have a look at what clocks ECS offer us out of the box, but more importantly what we're able to achieve ourselves.

The Package

Checking out the package, there's not much going on with a DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMI connector being included. As for the box saying GTX 450, that's just a typing error. Originally it looked like NVIDIA was going to call the model the GTX 450, but it was changed at the last minute. ECS had their boxes ready and the initial samples that went out carried with it the wrong name. This is a GTS 450.