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While it's great that Nvidia has finally managed to squeeze its Fermi architecture into the mainstream of the GPU market, our excitement is tempered by the fact we were hoping for more from it.
When the GTS 450 first hit the shelves, we were looking at a card that had been priced to go directly up against AMD's HD 5770. Unfortunately, it wasn't fast enough to give it a good thrashing across the benchmark board, with the Nvidia card winning a few tests and the AMD winning others.
With all the above said, we're basing our opinions on the launch price, which we may see dropping quite quickly. In order to get some volume sales, it really needs to.
Realistically, we may well also be seeing this card shipped in pre-built systems, rather than it being a part that's going to fly off the shelves in your favourite etailer.
We liked
Having a half-height DirectX 11 card is great, even if it's by no means new.
The GT 430 isn't a bad performer either, giving playable framerates in modern titles even with a few bells and whistles turned on.
It's also got all the CUDA goodness too, with the boost to video encoding and HD video playback prowess that brings.
We disliked
Unfortunately, it's really no better than the AMD HD 5570, which was released almost at the start of the year. This sort of performance in a half-height card is good, but it's already been done.
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