ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent Review

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ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent Review by VR-Zone.com

Nearly all modern GPUs are designed for use with active cooling systems, in order to allow for desirable levels of performance within a reasonable form factor. To take a GPU intended for active cooling and cool it passively would entail a compromise in performance, size, or both.

The passive graphics card we're looking at today is ASUS' ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent. While the GeForce GTS 450 is by no means the fastest GPU around, its relatively low TDP of 106W (for NVIDIA's reference design) makes it a good candidate for passive cooling.



In the case of the ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent, ASUS has decided to sacrifice performance instead of size. The core clock on this card is ~25% slower than NVIDIA's reference speed. ASUS has also opted to use DDR3 memory, which has lower power consumption but also much lower bandwidth than GDDR5 memory.

In terms of performance, the reference GTS 450 sits roughly in between AMD's HD 5770 and HD 5750 (now renamed the HD 6770 and HD 6750 respectively).

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The ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent's 15 centimetre PCB is one of the shortest we've seen in recent times. However, the heatsink extends past the PCB, bringing the overall length of the card to 19 centimetres (the specifications listed on ASUS' website appear to incorrectly quote PCB length only).

Also, the two heatpipes extend quite tall and whole card takes up two slots, rendering it incompatible with most ITX setups.



For our comparison today, we will be using a Gainward GTS450 GLH (on the right) with its stock active cooling setup.



Unlike all the other GTS 450s out there, the ENGTS450 lacks a 6-pin PCIe power connector.



The ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent sports a HDMI, VGA and DVI port.



Only a driver disc and manual are included



On with the testing...

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Benchmarks





























As we can see, the reduced clockspeeds and memory bandwidth in the ENGTS450 Silent has badly hurt its credentials, losing out to all the cards in our comparison and not offering playable framerates at normal resolutions. This is clearly not a card for serious gaming.

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Power Consumption





As expected from the reduced clockspeeds, the ENGTS450 has lower power consumption relative to the regular GTS450. However it got edged by the HD5770/6770 in the load test, which showed nearly twice the performance during our benchmarks in the previous section.





The ENGTS450 Silent runs very cool at its default clockspeeds even at load. The temperature test was conducted in an open (i.e. caseless) setup.

If you're planning to use this in a completely silent setup with no fans, then the power profile and temperature characteristics of the ENGTS450 Silent makes it a contender for your dollars.

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Overclocking

Keeping the core voltage @ 1.05v and using a 120mm fan to blow at the heatsink, we managed to push the ENGTS450 Silent to 900mhz (from 595) on the core, 1800mhz (from 1190) on the shaders, and 900mhz (from 800) on the memory.

Your mileage will of course vary depending on the amount of ventilation the ENGTS450 Silent gets.



Conclusion

The target audience of this card is very limited. Other than those aiming to build an entirely passive setups, there are plenty of custom-designed graphic cards in the market which will run at very acceptable noise levels.

Power consumption is slightly lower than the reference GTS 450, but ASUS could probably have done more as the HD 5770 offered twice the performance for the same load power consumption.

This card also comes very late in the game, when the GTS 450 has fallen from the mainstream segment to become an entry level SKU.

Even overclocked, the ENGTS450 DirectCU Silent will not be able to play the most demanding games except with reduced settings.

At this level of performance, we can only recommend this card for HD Video Playback, school/office environments and anything else except modern 3D gaming. If that is the case, it simply does not offer any advantage to get it over Intel IGP or AMD Fusion APU solutions.







Retail Price: US$139