The Card

We have seen numerous versions of the ASUS DirectCU cooler on many cards in the last months. This time the color theme is black and green - completely appropriate.


Like all other GTS 450 cards tested today, the card requires two slots in your system.


While installing the card in our noise-testing system which uses an ECS P45 motherboard, I noticed that the pins holding the VRM heatsink in place stick out and make contact with the memory slots. It is still possible to get the card seated with a little bit of force, but that is something that shouldn't happen. I tested several other motherboards and the card fit just fine, so it's probably a combination of bad design on both graphics card and motherboard.


The card has two DVI ports, and one HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. On NVIDIA cards you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU, which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to two GTS 450 cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings. We also posted a GTS 450 SLI review today, so don't forget to check that out.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.