G450LE

[Ashley]

Haven't seen a review of this one, so in case anyone's interested... It has 6ns. Samsung 64-bit SDR memory, and like the DDR the memory is clocked at 166MHz. Everything else is the same. At stock speed the LE benchmarks about 30% lower that the DDR but can be clocked much higher (the DDR hung at 190MHz, the SDR was quite happy at 200MHz).

I'm not sure who the DDR version is targeted at since its slower than a vanilla G400; but at 20% less money - with everything else being equal - the SDR card looks to be a decent value.

Beware: both the DDR and SDR cards I got were box-less, and neither included a cable. Only the SDR card was tagged LE ("Light Edition"?), so don't assume that a DDR version is a "Regular Edition" just because it's not tagged LE.

[xortam]

http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/009870.html

[WetWilly]

Thanks for posting that info. I've been curious about the performance difference between SDR and DDR.

[Greebe]

Hey Ashley, what's the deal with PS 2.78 cranking up the Gamma level @ default on a G450... Damn that sucks! Uninstalling

[Ashley]

I'm not sure - you can always disable the gamma controls on the Color calibration page (they are enabled by default).

But you wouldn't really want to use 2.78 with a G450 anyway; there's no G450-specific code in there and the thing hasn't been updated to work with any new chips since May.

[Greebe]

I'm a Matrox beta tester so without having to saying it...

Curious, If the LE version benchmarks 30% lower than the DDR, but OC's 5% higher, which would have an end result of the SDR being 25% slower, how is that an advantage?
(Oy, could you follow that?! LOL

[Ashley]

- I follow, but I didn't say there was an "advantage" did I?

All I was suggesting was that the LE was a pretty good value if you were looking at G450s. Especially for business use, since it has everything the DDR version has.

Now, for entertainment use the LE was slower BUT - and I only tested 2 boards, not 200 - because the SDR memory could be clocked higher, the engine ran faster.

So here's the thing: on some 3D benchmarks, the stock SDR version was only slightly slower than the stock DDR board, and the overclocked SDR version actually benchmarked higher than the overclocked DDR version.