Legit Video Card Reviews
ECS GeForce GTS 450 1GB Black Edition Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) |
| Product: | NBGTS450-1GPI-F |
| Date: | Wed, Oct 13, 2010 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
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Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The ECS GeForce GTS 450 Black Series 1GB video card is a very impressive graphics card since it uses the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro heatsink. The Accelero Twin Turbo Pro GPU cooler retails for $50 itself, so to get it pre-installed on the ECS GeForce GTS 450 is a nice touch. This cooler features two 92mm PWM fans and 4-heatpipes that connect to 35 cooling fins achieve up to 120 Watts cooling capacity. The GeForce GTS 450 has a TDP rating of 106 Watts, so this cooler can easily handle an overclocked card like this and the temperature testing results show that. The ECS GeForce GTS 450 Black series card was the quietest of the bunch and also cooler than the five GeForce GTS 450 cards that we have benchmarked. If noise and temperatures are a big deal to your purchase decision then you'd be hard pressed to find a better solution on the market for an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 video card.
Overall performance of the ECS GeForce GTS 450 Black Series 1GB video card was solid and it performed just like other cards that are overclocked with the same clock frequencies. Overclocking performance on the ECS Black GTS 450 was also really good as were able to reach 985MHz on the core clock with full stability. We were able to get ~14% better performance when gaming thanks to this benchmark, and the best part of the overclock was that the card was still cool and running silently.
Visually, the ECS Black GTS 450 looks great, but we'd love to see a black PCB on a black series card. ECS is using a blue PCB and it just looks out of place with the black and white Accelero Twin Turbo Pro GPU cooler. We'd love to see a black PCB and to see ECS stick with the 'Black' theme that they are trying to go with. In an ideal world ECS should also update their driver disk to include newer versions of free software they are offering and also offer support for 64-bit Windows operating systems.
When it comes to pricing we searched for the ECS GeForce GTS 450 Black 1GB video card and couldn't find pricing for it anywhere. In fact, we searched Google Shopping with part number NBGTS450-1GPI-F and found that it pulls up nothing. ECS offers three different GeForce GTS 450 cards that you should be aware of. One features reference clock speeds and the other two are overclocked and differ just by the heat sink they offer. Newegg has the overclocked NGTS450-1GPI-F version with the reference NVIDIA GPU cooler for $109.99 after a $20 rebate. We know the NBGTS450-1GPI-F that we reviewed here today will cost more since it uses an improved GPU cooler, but we aren't sure what the exact price will be. All of the ECS GeForce GTS 450 1GB video cards carry a 3-year limited warranty on parts and 2-years on labor, which will easily last you until the next generation of NVIDIA cards are released!
If you are looking for a GeForce GTS 450 1GB video card and noise levels and temperatures are concerns then the ECS Black series should be on the top of your shopping list.
Legit Bottom Line: The ECS GeForce GTS 450 1GB Black series video card is by far the quietest and coolest running GTS 450 cards that we have reviewed to date.
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| Review Index |
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Page 1 - The ECS GTS 450 Video Card
Page 2 - Retail Box and Bundle Page 3 - The Test System Page 4 - Aliens vs. Predator Page 5 - Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY Page 6 - Just Cause 2 Page 7 - Metro 2033 Page 8 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat Page 9 - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Page 10 - 3DMark Vantage Page 11 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11 Page 12 - FurMark 1.8.2 Page 13 - Temperature Testing Page 14 - Power Consumption Page 15 - ECS GeForce GTS 450 Overclocking Page 16 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
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