Judging by some early listings, it appears that Nvidia AIBs will offer overclocked GTS 450 cards right from the launch and the pricing looks quite tempting.

A few days ago we wrote about Asus’ GTS 450 DirectCU, but it as it turns out Asus is also preparing an overclocked version with the TOP moniker. According to some GPU-Z screens posted at xtremesystems the board should end up with 925/1850/4000MHz clocks instead of 783/1566/3600MHz. The board was even benched and it managed to match HD 5770 performance in some tests. However, reference boards will end up somewhat slower and isn't on a par with the HD 5770. You can probably expect reference cards to outperform the HD 5750 though and that's what we expected anyway.

Gigabyte is also readying two flavors, the GV-N450 and GV-N450OC but we are clueless about the clocks. An EVGA board, designated 01G-P3-1450-TR, is listed in Australia and New Zealand, but it appears to be reference clocked and it's priced at AUD 177.

However, both judging by several listings in Canada, the overclocked boards should end up less than C$10 more expensive than regular models.

Reference boards are priced between C$149 and C$153, whereas the overclocked boards should sell between C$158 and C$164. For comparison, the same retailers are selling GTX 460 boards for anywhere from C$230 to C$260. All in all the pricing seems quite reasonable, as AMD’s HD 5750 is selling in the C$150 to C$165 price range.

It appears that the GTS 450 could offer good value for money and it should be able to hold its own against 5700 series Radeons in terms of performance. However, it also consumes quite a bit more juice than the Radeons, but at this point it seems like a pretty nice and rather affordable alternative. In any case AMD will introduce the 6000 series within months, so the GTS 450 probably won't be as competitive in the long run.

More here.