Admittedly, the GTX 400 family of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs is still too expensive for the most of us, but the good news is, we're looking at one of the newer cards unveiled to date, and that's the GTX 465s. Two steps down from the crown, this card is cut down enough in terms of sheer speed to give us a more affordable Fermi without slimming down on the features this card promises to suavely deliver – we're talking about a more thorough support for Direct X 11 features here. This is, after all, the main selling point of the Fermi – one of the reasons why you'd consider this over the more aggressively valued ATI Radeon HD 5000 card. We check out Galaxy's GeForce GTX 465 and see just how it delivers the promised visual delights.
The Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 Graphics Card
Design: The Mothership's Arrived
Basically, all of these cards – unless extensively modified by GPU vendor partners – follow a basic reference design. If you've read our unboxing of the Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 lately, you may notice that this card looks a tad different, as if it's marketed towards kids and the youth. It still follows the base design of the reference GTX 465, except Galaxy's opted to change the case with something like that of a space ship's hull. There's still only 1 fan providing with their model, except that it can be opened and flipped up for the user to easily access the heatsink fins for cleaning.
There are LED lights on the rear of the fan as well. And unlike other cards, there are a few gaps on the casing design with the Galaxy's, and it's not an open side where the dual 6-pin ports are situated. The card follows a reference design for the rear, providing a set of dual dual-link DVIs and mini HDMI interfaces.
Highlights: Same Great Features
For a detailed overview of the features the Fermi provides, please refer to our previous Highlight story covering this. The GTX465 is basically the same as the 470 and 480 with a few CUDA cores cut out and speed reduced for certain components. But as far as features are concerned, this card promises to deliver what's expected from the Fermi at a more affordable price tag that is. NVIDIA touts this as their most powerful GPU for under US $300, too.
The GeForce GTX 465 we have here has a CUDA core count of 352 vs. the GTX 470's 448, and the GTX 480's 480. Graphics and processor clock remains the same as with the GTX 470 though at 607MHz and 1215MHz respectively. With the decreased core count, the amount of power needed now stands at 200 watts vs. the GTX 470's 215 watt sand the GTX 480's 250 watts. With higher electricity prices a constant in this country, this will mean something, and more so for those who like to run their computers at full speed for the most part of the day. So there is something else to look forward to aside from a more affordable price tag.
Scaling down in terms of performance, the other key specs of the GTX 465 have also followed suit. Memory has been reduced to 1024MB or a gigabyte of GDDR5 compared to the GTX 470's 1280MB base configuration. Memory Clock's set at 1604MHz, a slight decrease vs. the GTX 470's 1674MHz, and the interface width's been reduced to 256-bit compared to the latter's 320-bit, effectively reducing memory bandwidth to 102.6GB/s from 133.9GB/s. Texture fill rate also stands at 26.7 billion per second against the GTX 470's 34 billion per second.
What does this all mean? With the GTX 465 not being as hungry as it's 470 and 480 counter parts, there's no need to keep the other aspects of the GPU ramped up.
With the effective CUDA cores reduced, the dedicated tessellation units stand at 11, compared to 14 on the GTX 470 and 15 on the GTX 480. In this regard, it's still more than capable than its ATI Radeon counterpart, which has but 1 dedicated tessellation unit implemented. For the benefit of those who blanked out the part where we started talking about this feature, it's basically a technique for developers to use the GPU to modify and exponentially add details to their models on the fly. Simply put, this is yet another step forward into seeing more realistic and detailed looking 3D worlds and characters, and the textures we see won't just look “fake” anymore, but rather, supported by details on the actual 3D model it wraps. Take for example, bullet holes, dents, and scrapes, brick walls, and rocky roads.
It may seem like a castrated GTX 470, but all this means is that NVIDIA's cut down the 465 in terms of performance, but not on the features provided for by the GF100 design. We can still expect to play titles with ramped up settings, but to get the best speeds – and we're talking of smooth gameplay and animations, we may have to limit our base resolution and antialiasing and texture processing post processing effects to non-extreme levels while enabling visual effects to high quality. Of course, there's still SLI to look forward to in case one's interested in the triple monitor 3D Vision Surround setup when that finally hits the Philippines.
Now that we've briefly swept over the key differences between the GTX 465 and its more beefed up relatives, let's see how the card performs with several popular benchmarks and entertainment titles using our test bench.
Performance: Scaled Down GTX 470
For the uninitiated, the GTX 465 stands as among the “entry-level” highend graphics cards available in NVIDIA's GTX 400 portfolio, and you can expect it to deliver some visually delighting experience when you run PC games with it (that's primarily what these are bought for, are they not?) We'll be throwing several benchmarks at the GTX465 with various settings, steadily increasing in visual quality, which in turn will increase in load for the card.
How can you tell whether it's capable of delivering a decent gaming experience for you? Given specific settings, we've recorded average frames per second (FPS) rates. What you should be looking for is at least 30FPS. 24FPS can be considered the bare minimum to get a smooth enough experience and anything below this will lead to frustration, and you may just want to consider lowering or turning off some of the graphics settings you've beefed up. 60FPS is a good indicator that the game is a cinch for the graphics card and is able to render gameplay very smoothly, and anything above that, and the graphics card is already overkill for the given title, but nonetheless interesting to take note of.
Keep in mind the frame rates recorded here is based on an average. Some scenes in the benchmark may be faster (less complex) or slower (more complex) for the card to render, some of which we'll discuss, and in a benchmark cycle these are also considered before the average is computed.
To give us an idea how this GPU fares, results are compared with that of the recently reviewed Palit GeForce GTX 470. The NVIDIA GeForce driver used is version 257.21.
| HyperGear Bench | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-750 2.66GHz |
| Cooler | Standard |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3P |
| Memory | G.Skill Trident 2x 2GB 2000MHz @ 1333MHz |
| Graphics | Zotac GeForce 8800GTS |
| Hard Drive | Samsung Spinpoint 1TB (32MB Cache) |
| Optical Drive | LG GH20LS10 Super Multi Drive |
| Power Supply | Cougar CM Power 700W |
Futuremark 3DMark 2006
In this benchmark we can see that just like the Palit's GeForce GTX 470 this GTX 465 had no problems chewing up this review with scores of 16889 for the first test with 1920 x 1080 without AA and AF, and 11199 for the second with the same resolution and with 8x AA and 16x AF. There is still a notable difference between the two graphics cards, and the difference only starts becoming more apparent with greater load on the GPU.
Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
Performance was still great under 3DMark Vantage's Performance preset with a score of 14,120 and very much acceptable under the High preset with a score of 9,154. The difference in performance between th two cards in this test is close to linear – showing a slightly greater difference under the Performance preset and becomes closer under the High preset.
Unigine Heaven
Score
Average Frame Rate
Without tessellation, a 1920 x 1080 setup with 1xAA and 0xAF yielded an average FPS of 42.5, and this went down to 25 with tessellation on. 8xAA and 16xAF without tessellation still took its toll on the card, yielded an average frame rate of 26.8, which is still acceptable. But if enable extreme tessellation, we're left with just an average frame rate of 16.4. As we can see, performance under the Unigine Heaven for this card tails the GTX 470 in an almost linear, predictable manner. Without tessellation, there's a 7-10FPS difference between the two cards, and this closes in to 4-6FPS with that on.
THQ Company of Heroes
This title was again easily chewed upon by the GTX 465. Under 1280 x 720 with full graphic effects and 16xCSAA, we can see performance to be very close to the GTX 470, having an average frame rate of 136.3 vs 142.7. Bumping up to 1920 x 1080 under the same graphic settings gave us more of a difference between the two in terms of average frame rates – the Galaxy was able to do 93.4 vs. the GTX 470's 112.4.
Capcom Street Fighter IV
Average Frame Rate
Score
While the difference is actually negligible from a practical perspective due to the high frame rates, the difference in performance between the two cards can still be seen here where the Galaxy's GTX 465 managed to do 114.8 and 119.14FPS under 1920 x 1080 with full graphic settings in 8xAA/16xTF, and 16xAA/16xTF. The notable increase in performance using the higher texture filtering settings is also present here.
Capcom Resident Evil
Graphics card performance under this heavier Direct X 10 title from Capcom is more reasonable and we can see the GTX 465 still performing well under 1920 x 1080 with full graphics settings under 8x AA and 16x AA: 77FPS for the former and 73.4FPS for the latter. Difference with the GTX 470 can be seen to be about 20FPS and this card scales well against its bigger brother.
Rebellion Alien vs. Predator
Again, we can see the same level of scaling here between the GTX 465 and 470 with a difference of 6FPS under 1920 x 1080 with full graphics settings and Direct X 11 features enabled, under 3 different AF settings. Of course, even with the small differences between the different AF settings, the result is closer to being barely playable, with average frame rates hovering between 22.3 for maxed out settings to 24.1 for toned down AF.
THQ Metro 2033
In this pretty heavy Direct X 11 title, we'll be able to see a greater difference in capabilities between the GTX 465 and 470. Using 1920 x 1080, everything is playable with AAA and 4x AF and without the Direct X 11 special features enabled. However, once we turn on any of these, or simply bump up to 4xMSAA and 16xAF, performance becomes noticeably slower, and even more so with everything enabled. With the latter, we can see where the GTX 465 stands, and that's a 6.1 average FPS vs the GTX 470's 18.37
Cost: Scaled Down Pricing, Too
With this family coming in with an SRP price of US $279 or close to about PhP 13,000, it sure beats having to fork out US $349 for a GTX 470. The more price conscious enthusiasts will be the eager beavers who'll be eying this card... that is until we see another Fermi GPU model released, and one that's closer to the mid-range sector. Once more there's another in-between rival between ATI's Radeon HD5830 and HD5850 out, and if we're talking about sheer pricing, we can see ATI's got the upper hand, but then again, you're getting more in terms of features with the Fermi, and those come at an understandably slightly higher premium.
| Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 Specifications | |
|---|---|
| GPU | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 |
| Memory | 1024MB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface | 256-bit |
| CUDA Cores | 352 |
| Graphics Clock | 607MHz |
| Process Clock | 1215MHz |
| Texture Fill Rate | 26.7 billion / sec |
| Memory Clock | 1603MHz |
| NVIDIA SLI Ready | Yes - 2-way / 3-way |
| NVIDIA 3D Vision Ready | Yes |
| NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready | Yes |
| NVIDIA PureVideo Technology | HD |
| NVIDIA PhysX Ready | Yes |
| NVIDIA CUDA Ready | Yes |
| Microsoft DirectX 11 Ready | Yes |
| OpenGL Support | Version 4.0 |
| Max VGA / Digital Resolution | 2048 x 1536 / 2560 x 1600 |
| Interfaces | Dual dual-link DVI, mini HDMI (1.3a support, HDCP compliant, with audio input) |
| Max GPU Temperature | 105 degrees Celsius |
| Max Graphics Card Power | 200W |
| Recommended Power Supply | 550W |
| Supplementary Power Connectors | 2x 6-pin |
| Interface | PCI Express 2.0 x16 |
