Quite some time has passed since Nvidia first introduced the Fermi architecture back in March, but it's widespread adoption has been held back by the lack of more low-end solutions, most buyers being interested in midrange graphics cards that usually come with a much lower price tag.

The GTX 460 managed to get some of this market, but a much lower priced solution was needed in order to cater to those users that had even tighter budgets, so the GF106 graphics core was created.

This chip is what powers the GTS 450 in order to provide mainstream users with a DirectX 11 capable alternative to AMD HD 5770 and HD 5750 based solutions, Nvidia's newest desktop graphics chip being priced at about $130, similarly to HD 5770 graphics solutions.

Since the HD 5770 and HD 5750 were the only DirectX 11 graphics cards available at this price point, the arrival of the GTS 450 comes as a much welcomed breath of fresh air for the customer, competition usually bringing much lower prices, AMD's recent price drop for the HD 57xx series coming as a response to the GTS 450 launch.

As you have probably noticed until now, this is the first 400 series graphics card, based on the Fermi design, to get the GTS moniker, coming in as a replacement for the aging GTS 250 that was built using the long running G92 core introduced in 2007 with the 8800 GT.

The GTS 450 based card that we have in our todays review comes from Asus and unlike some some other vendors out there this Taiwanese manufacturer choose to go with a custom cooling solution, that features direct contact heatpipes for improved cooling.

Since this is a TOP model, the card also comes factory overclocked, the ENGTS450 TOP featuring one of the highest factory frequencies available for GTS 450 based graphics cards.

All this improvements sound quite impressive so let's move on on detailing the specs while also taking a closer look at Asus' ENGTS450 TOP design and performance.