Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
With the release of the GeForce GTX 465, NVIDIA brings an interesting product to the market. It has a reasonable enough TDP, the noise levels are as normal as can be and GPU temperatures are well under control. This is exactly what we would have liked to see with the GTX 480, that's for sure.
To achieve these values NVIDIA had to keep the clock frequency low and next to that, they disabled more clusters of shader processors. The end result is a GPU with 352 activated shader processors, a product that is competing with the Radeon HD 5830 mostly ... and you know what ? That actually poses an concern. I was just checking prices here in the Netherlands and you can pickup the R5830 for 210 EUR these days. Now we expect the GeForce GTX 465 to settle at roughly 269-289 EUR and that makes the difference money wise really big. The EURO dropping like a stone really isn't helping NVIDIA here either.
It becomes even more trivial though as at this very moment ATI could (if they wanted to) drop the price even lower, and NVIDIA definitely can not do the same at this point in time. Both products are fairly equal when it comes to features and performance though with the new 256 series drivers, we do see the GTX 400 series jumping up in overall performance proving that, as always, NVIDIA's drivers typically add more performance when time passes. Realistically though at 279 EUR we feel the GTX 465 should compete with a R5850, and that's just not happening.
With that said, the card is definitely good enough and we certainly do like the GTX 465 for what it is. Your game performance will be good as you will be able to play games in high resolutions with very nice image quality settings. Overall, the performance is nice. Added benefits are of course purchasing a CUDA ready product, and PhysX support. New for NVIDIA will be the 3D Surround Vision feature, but as of yet, no driver is available and you'll need two videocards to even be able to enable that features (multiple monitor gaming).
Multi-GPU performance then. NVIDIA seriously does have Willy Wonka's golden ticket in their hands when it comes to 2-way SLI performance. The scaling is just brilliant with each and every time we test it on a GTX 400 series card.
Tweaking -- I was really impressed by the overclock potential the card seems to offer. You should be able to lift another 150 MHz out of the core and thus another 300 MHz extra out of the shaders (both are locked in a 1:2 configuration ratio). Achieve that and you just gained another 15 to 20% performance. So yes, this series will have a lot of overclock potential alright.
So let me sum things up, we feel the GeForce GTX 465 is a DX11 and OpenGL 4.0 viable card that can address the market really well. It's not really power consumption greedy, not at all noisy and will not run very hot. Game performance is really very respectable. However the culprit today at launch will be its price. For this product to be sold like hot buns from the oven, it will need to drop below the 250 USD/EUR marker even go to 200 USD/EUR. In SLI the sky is the limit, and you can achieve massive performance thanks to really good multi-GPU scaling. Recommended -- but barely.
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** 17:00 update - conclusion slightly revised in better wording.
Thanks go out to Point of View for supplying the cards for this review.
