NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 Launch Roundup: Asus, EVGA, Palit, and Calibre Overclocked and Reviewed

Calibre X450G

Last but certainly not least in our roundup is Sparkle’s entry, a card from their high-end Calibre brand. The X450G is without a doubt the most exotic card in our roundup, and also one of the most problematic from a design standpoint. But starting with the specs, like the rest of the GTS 450 cards in today’s roundup this is a factory overclocked model, coming in at 850MHz core and 950MHz for the RAM, a 67MHz (9%) core overclock and a 48MHz (5%) memory overclock. This makes it the slowest of the cards in today’s roundup, as the other cards are all over 920MHz. Performance trends accordingly between the reference GTS 450 and the other overclocked cards.

The cooler on the X450G is immediately eyecatching, as Sparkle has completely thrown out all norms about what kind of a cooler to put on a mainstream card. Instead of the normal double-slot single-fan coolers we’ve seen on our other cards, Sparkle went with an absurdly huge triple-slot cooler in the form of an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro. The Twin Turbo Pro uses a set of 3 copper heatpipes attached to a copper baseplate to draw heat away from the GF106 GPU, feeding a massive aluminum heatsink that runs the length of the card and is easily a whole slot wide on its own. Sitting on top of the heatsink is a pair of 92mm fans, providing ample cooling and leading to the card taking up 3 slots. All things considered this is an absurd cooler for a GTS 450 as it’s rated for use on much more powerful cards such as the Radeon HD 5870, but as we’ll see in our results section we can’t argue with the effectiveness of it.

Sitting below the Twin Turbo Pro cooler is a pure NVIDIA reference board. Sparkle does not appear to have done anything here besides equipping a reference card with an oversized cooler, and indeed this is the cause of the issues we have with this card. As we mentioned earlier in this article, the PCB on this card bends – it bends by quite a lot. Our sample’s PCB it permanently and noticeably bowing towards the cooler on both sides of the GPU, a result of the fact that Sparkle used such a massive cooler without reinforcing the card. There’s easily a good 4mm between the heatsink and the tops of the biggest capacitors on this card, giving it plenty of room to bend, a liberty our sample has taken.

At this point we have concerns about the long-term reliability of the card; we’re not convinced it’s going to be able to take a couple of years of repeated heating and cooling without breaking a solder joint. Sparkle has a metal spine called VRT available to reinforce the card, but for reasons unknown they did not use it here. Based on this design flaw we would not be comfortable recommending this card less Sparkle reinforces it with VRT or another method.

Moving along, while the cooler is extremely effective at cooling the GPU, the design seems unbalanced for overclocking. The VRMs remain uncooled, meaning at the high voltages necessary for the extreme overclocking the GPU cooler is meant for the VRMs will overheat and fail long before the GPU will. Coupled with the 1.162v overvolt limit on those VRMs, and this card won’t be pushing higher overclocks than the rest of the cards in this roundup. In practice this unbalanced design means the cooler really isn’t doing anything extra to help overclocking – it’s just keeping the GPU very, very cool.

Rounding out the collection, the X450G comes packed with the usual collection of parts & paperwork: a manual, a driver CD, a molex-to-PCIe power adaptor, a DVI-to-VGA dongle, and interestingly enough a 5ft mini-HDMI cable. The card also comes packed with a trial version of MAGIX Video Easy SE video editor, and a “membership warranty card” for registering the card in order to get a 3^rd year of warranty service.

Sparkle is pricing the card at $150, placing it $20 over a reference card and right in the middle of the cards in today’s roundup.