ECS GeForce GTS 450 1GB Black Edition Video Card Review

Retail Box and Bundle

The retail box for the ECS Black GTS 450 video card with part number NBGTS450-1GPI-F looks awesome and pictures really don’t do it justice. The packaging has listed all the key features that the
card comes with and is easy to read.

Turning the retail box over, we see even more marketing
text in numerous languages and more details on key features like NVIDIA CUDA and PhysX.

With the ECS GeForce GTS 450 Black video card bundle removed from the box
we see that ECS included a pair of DVI-to-VGA and DVI-to-HDMI adapters,
a user’s guide & HDMI installation guide, a dual 4-pin molex to single 6-pin PCIe
power adapter and a drivers CD. No games were bundled with the card, but that is pretty normal these days, in all honesty. The one thing we thought was interesting was the HDMI installation guide as it gave step by step directions on how to install the SPDIF cable to the card and the header on your motherboard. The reason that this is funny is because the card doesn’t even have an SPDIF header on it and this cable isn’t needed in current generation cards. In fact, the user manual has just four pages in English and isn’t specific to this card, so it is not really relevant unless you don’t know the card needs power.

When you fire up the driver CD that comes with the card you’ll see
this GUI that allows you to check out the user manual and install the
drivers and utilities if needed. We tried to install the drivers from this disk and found that ECS only included Forceware 259.22 32-bit drivers and we couldn’t install any drivers on our test system with their disk since we run Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit on the test bench here at Legit Reviews. There are newer drivers available online anyway, so you don’t want to install these drivers anyway. We then clicked the software utility button and Adobe Reader 5.1 started to install. Adobe Reader 9.4 is the latest build, so this is a very old version and not even worth installing or offering, if you ask us. Other than the usual manuals and DirectX software we found that ECS included Badaboom trial version 1.2.1.40, which is actually current. Nothing too special here and a pointless disk to most gamers and enthusiasts as everyone knows these are dated the second that they are made.