Final Words & Conclusion
Very little negative can be said about two GeForce GTS 450 cards setup in SLI. In previous articles we have shown you guys already that the performance scaling of two GPUs is something the GTX 400 series is really good at. It was just that heat, noise and power consumptions became a constant nag. And that's just not the case with the GF106 GPU based GeForce GTS 450 cards.
You have been able to see that with the more GPU stringent resolutions and modern games you can quite easily gain roughly double up performance with two of these cards. Now for the reference GTS 450 cards we expect prices to fall quickly, and as such you will inevitable get a nice chunk of performance for say 225 EUR, it's still far away from one single high-end card though. Even setup in SLI this is not a heap of performance, but the overall scaling is exemplary. Gaming in a monitor resolution up-to 1920x1200 and at say 4xAA / 16 AF will be fine.
Keep in mind, to be able to operate two or more cards in SLI mode you'll need an actual SLI certified motherboard, most X58 motherboards are in fact SLI certified, some P55 motherboards as well. That or an nForce motherboard (which is a dying breed). But carefully make sure and check that out before opting for SLI. Check boxes, but also the ODMs clearly specify this at their websites.
Scaling wise things can not get any better, now there was a good reason for including the R5770 setup in Crossfire in this article, in the end price wise it really is/will become the direct competitor to the GeForce GTS 450. And if we look purely at performance, the Radeon HD 5770 is the overall performance winner. ATI trumped pretty much any scenario when we look at pure and raw unadulterated performance scaling. Two way CrossfireX has gotten so much better and is still getting better and better with each quarter of the year that passes. Especially with the help of the new CrossfireX profile patches scaling really looks much better and games get supported somewhat more quickly. The upper hand of overall driver compatibility however goes to NVIDIA as they have their stuff clearly better supported with user based multi-GPU profiles and driver releases alongside the release of new games. Of course with NVIDIA you get added benefits like PhysX and 3D Surround gaming, soi in the end it's probably a choice of which brand you personally prefer the most.
Hey, it's all about your bucks and personal preference, all we can say is that we enjoyed testing these two cards in SLI. We have not seen any driver issues, no weird stuff and neither did we had to configure anything to get multi-GPU support going. Everything worked straight out of the box with near perfect scaling. As such if you are interested in admirable SLI scaling performance and are gaming with a limited budget, then this might be a fun alternative for 225~250 EUR (and soon hopefully lower) you get to have a decent amount of DX11 compatible gaming performance that will last you a while.
