Sooner or later you will need to replace your video card, it's a fact of life in this here electronic age. But not everyone is going to buy the big, expensive top-of-the-line card for their system. Why, you ask? Well, the vast majority of people actually don't have king size monitors and are running resolutions that would be considered small by what I am used to. People that run 22 inch and smaller monitors are going to be running resolutions that fall in the 1680x1050 range and below. Don't get me wrong, the first 22 inch monitor I purchased looked huge next to the 19 inch LCD I had before then so that really is a major leap forward in screen real estate. Just looking through the polls here at OCC you get the feeling that even 24 inch monitors have not come of age. So that puts the bulk of the buying crowd in a position to buy the graphics card they need without going overboard and still have plenty of cash for the rest of the system, while still getting excellent gaming performance in the games they play.ATI has had its DirectX 11 product stack filled out for a while now and have really hit the price and performance points pretty well. Since NVIDIA was a bit late to the game with its Fermi architecture the company has begun to really fight for those price and performance points to take back marketshare from the red team. The Fermi architecture is a modular design and as such, you can reduce the amount of computing components to reach a specific price, power and performance point. The GF 104 based GTX 460 is a great example of this scalable architecture at work. It delivered excellent performance and met thermal and power requirements, all for a price that fit the performance. Next up we have the GF 106 based GTS 450. This model is the replacement for the aging GTS 250 and based on the GTS designation this is not part of the enthusiast line up but the performance lineup aimed squarely at the gaming public. NVIDIA has targeted its products to three distinct sets of customers, the GTX 480, or "Tank," is the card for the person that wants the best at any cost. The GTX 460, or "Hunter," is for the mid range segment that needs the horsepower but not at the level needed by the higher class. Then we get to the "Sniper," or GTS 450 that is aimed at the performance gamer on a budget. It does not have the firepower but still gets the job done. Along that line, the scalable Fermi architecture has been scaled down to a similar level as the GF 104 based GTX 460. The GTS 450 is equipped with a single GPU cluster with four streaming multi processors that house 192 CUDA cores, four polymorph engines, 32 texture units, 16 ROP units and 256KB of shared L2 cache. Memory comes in the form of 1GB of GDDR5 running through a 128-bit bus. Below is a block diagram of how the GF 106 core is laid out. At this level of performance you have to wonder what the pricing is going to be for a card of this stature. The price point for this introduction is $129, right