System Overview & Testing Procedures
We will be installing the Gigabyte GTS 450 into our new test system. This test system is comprised of an Intel Core i7 965 Extreme, Gigabyte X58A-UD5 motherboard, 6GB of memory, 750GB SATA drive, Blu-ray drive, and Zalman ZM1000-HP 1000W power supply, all inside the BitFenix Colossus case.
We will be comparing the Gigabyte GTS 450 to the Sapphire Radeon HD 6850 and HIS Radeon HD 5850 card. Keep in mind these other 2 cards are not the lower-end cards like the GTS 450 is and cost about $100 more. They are just here for reference.
Opening up GPU-Z we can see all the information on the Gigabyte GTS 450 card. The main thing that we notice here is the GPU clock of 810MHz which is overclocked from the reference GTS 450 speed of 783MHz.
Before we get into the real testing let’s see what the temperatures look like on this card. Temperatures were recorded with GPU-Z. Idle and load states were taken an hour apart from each other.
We will be running 2 different types of tests on the card. The first are benchmarking programs, most of which you should be familiar with. The second part of the testing is actual game testing. The programs and games we are using are listed below as well as links where you can download or purchase them.
Video Tests
3DMark Vantage (download)
Heaven Demo 2.1 (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)
Game Tests
Crysis Warehead (Buy)
Alien vs. Predator (Buy)
Resident Evil 5 (Buy)
DiRT 2 (Buy)
Now on to the testing!
