This should come as a surprise to absolutely no-one, but the specs of NVIDIA's upcoming mid-range GTS 450 have now been semi-officially confirmed.
A pre-dated press-release was sent to TechConnect - which has since been removed - that revealed the existence of the ASUS ENGTS450 DirectCU and confirmed almost everything we know about the upcoming GPU. The chip will feature 192 Cuda cores (four 48-core clusters) and will run at speeds of 783MHz for the core and 1,566MHz for the shaders.
The 1GB GDDR5 sits on a 128-bit bus and will operate at 900MHz for an effective frequency of 3,600MHz.
This is of course the first outing for the new GF106 architecture, which will measure a relatively large 238mm2.
The most important piece of information is the price, though. The press release gave the ASUS card a MSRP or $150 or €150. This works out to around £115 (including VAT), which is a little lower than we had expected, and positions it squarely between the 1GB Radeon HD 5750 and the Radeon HD 5770. With performance expected to be about on par with the more powerful of those two cards, the pricing seems very competitive.
The GTS 450 will become officially official in the next few weeks, so be prepared to see cards from other manufacturers soon. Based on what we've seen with the GTX 460, this should include a good number of factory-overclocked variants.
