Final thoughts and rating
Releasedtwo months after the soft launch of the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 GPUs, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465's arrival on the same week as COMPUTEX is no surprise.NVIDIA's taken the GTX 400-series design and calculated how it can reduce the architecture, in light of current yields, to make the GTX 465 a compelling product at a $299 (£230-£250) price point.
Compared to the $349 (£280-£300) GTX 470, the newer card vital stats reveal a 20 per cent drop in theoretical power, with most of the reduction coming from fewer CUDA cores, a narrower memory-bus, and a smaller frame-buffer.
Our benchmarks show that theory does translate into pragmatism, because the GTX 465 trails the GTX 470 by 15-20 per cent in most cases. Looking across to the obvious competitor, Radeon HD 5850, GeForce GTX 465 is, on average, 15 per cent slower at the 1,920x1,200 resolution and 20 per cent at 2,560x1,600.
It's not all doom and gloom, though, because on the plus side, the card's quieter than either the GTX 470/480, and it overclocks well, with our sample hitting 750MHz core and 3,600MHz easily.
NVIDIA is soon to roll out 3DVision support and will continue to bang on the CUDA drum ad nauseam. The GeForce 400-series architecture will also, we believe, look better as time goes on, but, given a budget of <£250 right now, our choice would be the Radeon HD 5850.
NVIDIA's stab at enabling partners to make a sub-$300 GTX 4xx card is compromised by a too-severe cut in performance - just look at the GTX 470 vs. GTX 465 numbers for confirmation. GTX 465 cards need to be closer to £200, all in, to make good sense for the enthusiast.
ASUS' GeForce GTX 465 1,024MB card is based on the reference design but adds in the always-useful SmartDoctor application. Reference-based designs live or die by the underlying architecture, so the ASUS package, whilst decent in itself, is only an average proposition at £230-£250.
Bottom line: NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465 is a welcome addition to the high-end graphics-card sector. We reckon retail cards will make real sense once super-clocked models are released at sub-£250.
The good
Fermi goodness brought to a lower price point
Architecture shows considerable untapped promise
Quieter than either the GTX 470 and GTX 480 when real-world gaming
ASUS' SmartDoctor application provides some extra overclocking headroom
US pricing ($299) makes the GPU competitive
The not so good
Too-severe an architectural chop for a £250 card, in the UK at least
Radeon HD 5850 is still a better proposition at the same price point
Power-draw characteristics still not ideal
HEXUS Rating
ASUS GeForce GTX 465 1,024MB
HEXUS Where2Buy
TBC.HEXUS Right2Reply
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