ASUS GTS 450 DirectCU TOP Video Card Review

·       DirectCU copper cooler

·       Up to 20% cooler during game play

·       925MHz core clock speed

·       Non-reference PCB

·       2000MHz memory speed

·       4000MHz memory clock effective

·       64GB/second memory bandwidth

·       128-bit memory bus

·       DirectX 11.0 support

·       DirectCompute

·       Hardware Tessellation

·       Shader Model 5.0

·       PhysX

·       3D Vision

·       3D Vision Surround

·       SLI

The GF106 chip on the GeForce GTS 450 chip is NVIDIA’s newest video chip. It is the third of the GF100 chips, following the GF100 found on the GeForce GTX 480, 470, 465 and the GF104 found on the GeForce GTX 460 cards. The chip is manufactured on TSMC’s 40nm process with 1.17 billion transistors. According to NVIDIA, the chip is about 225mm2 in size.

The architecture of the GF106 is most like the GF104 in terms of structure. It has 192 CUDA cores separated into four Shader Multiprocessors with 48 CUDA cores per SM. The GF 104 on the other hand has 2 GPCs with seven Shader Multiprocessors and 336 CUDA cores for the GeForce GTX 460 (one SM is disabled on the 460 leaving 7 and 336 instead of 8 and 384.)

ASUS has really cranked up the clocks on the GTS 460 DirectCU TOP card. Instead of the 783MHz/1566MHz core/Shader clock of the reference design, ASUS has gone with a core clock of 925MHz, a huge increase of 142MHz over the standard reference clock. The memory clock on this beast is also clocked higher at 1000MHz or 4000MHz effective. This gives a memory bandwidth of 64GB/second with the 128-bit memory bus.

One thing that differentiates ASUS motherboards is their Xtreme Design feature like Solid Capacitors, and EZ DIMM installation. They have carried that over to the new GeForce GTS 450 DirectCU TOP card with features like the ASUS Dust-proof fan, ASUS GPU Guard, Doubled over-current protection, EMI protection, Smart Doctor, and GamerOSD.

The traditional cooling fan has a gap between the fan blade and the hub. Dust collects on the fan hub as the dust collects on it. If you have ever opened a computer up and found dust on the graphics card you have witnessed this first hand.  ASUS has sealed the fan area twice, making it virtually dust-proof. This extends the graphics cards lifespan by up to 25% longer than traditional video cards without the dust-free protection.

GPU Guard doubles the structural reinforcement of the card. If you have ever had a heavy video card like the HD 5970 or GeForce GTX480 crack due to the weight of the card forcing the card to bend and crack on a case this solves the problem. Doubling the structural reinforcement on the card allows for ease of mind when installing a heavy video card on a system compared to without it. ASUS uses POSCaps on their DirectCU TOP card. POSCaps are solid electrolytic chip capacitors using Tantalum.

ASUS has double over-current protection for risk-free computing.  Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) is a problem with modern computing and especially on video cards as you can short out the card with it. ASUS has Fuse protection on their DirectCU TOP card, which doubles the protection against ESD. Modern cards have over-current protection, which results on damage to the GPU if it malfunctions, the Fuse on the DirectCU card will provide a second layer of protection. The card also has an EMI shield to provide less radiation output than without it by 66%.