Introduction

For budget conscious gamers, getting the most for your money means getting the right hardware upgrade that will complement your existing system. Getting a very high end card now does not make sense, for example, if you are running a 2-year old dual-core system and gaming on a 19" monitor. Enthusiasts who buy the latest, fastest and expensive hardware are a minority (albeit very vocal) among gamers. A quick look at the monthly Steam hardware survey shows a starkly revealing contrast in the hardware used by gamers who play online and gamers who frequent PC enthusiast forums.

Most of the monitors used for gaming are set to 1280x1024, taking up 17.63% of the total share, followed by 1680x1050 at 16.93%, according to July 2010's Steam Hardware survey.  More than half, 57%, of the total gaming resolutions fall between those two settings.  Even though the GTX 460 is available now from Nvidia, and is aimed at mainstream gamers, the majority of players who fall under the "budget" category ($150 or below), who play in these resolutions or lower, only have ATI cards to choose from, if they want to play DX11 games....until now.

The EVGA GTS 450 FTW Edition is a top of the line factory overclocked GPU that delivers blazingly over-the-top DirectX 11 performance out-of-the-box .  EVGA GTS 450 FTW cards have handpicked chips which are guaranteed to remain stable while gaming, despite clocking in at a significantly higher rate, compared to cards with stock settings.  If you are a gamer that has been holding out for an upgrade since the last two GPU architectural changes, the EVGA GTS 450 FTW just might be the card you are looking for to make the leap into DirectX 11 gaming.