EVGA and Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 SLI Video Card Review

The NVIDIA Geforce GTX 465

Today NVIDIA is unleashing the GeForce GTX 465! The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 is their “entry level” DirectX 11 Graphics card. To be honest though, I am not real sure that an MSRP of $279.99 quite qualifies as “entry level”. On the flip side of that same coin, the GeForce GTX 465 isn’t designed to compete with the ATI “entry level” DirectX 11 graphics cards which can be found for as little as $44.00 at Newegg.com. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 is poised to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5830 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850. I suppose you could call it an “entry level” into the high performance DirectX 11 market. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 is built on the same DirectX 11 architecture as the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, though it has undergone a few changes.

There are a couple of significant changes that have been made to the GF100 core to create the GeForce GTX 465. The first significant change is reduced Graphics Processing Clusters. Both the GTX 470 and GTX 480 use four clusters; NVIDIA reduced that number by one, limiting the GeForce GTX 465 to three that operate in parallel. Prior generation GPUs relied on a single Raster Engine. The number of Streaming Multiprocessors has been reduced from 15 on the GTX 480 to 11 on the GeForce GTX 465. Each of the Streaming Multiprocessors features 32 CUDA Cores. This gives the GeForce GTX 465 a total of 352 CUDA Cores to work with. The graphics clock remains unchanged when compared to the GeForce GTX 470. There have also been some significant changes to the memory; the memory speed has been reduced to 802MHz/3206MHz which is an overall drop of 142MHz from the GeForce GTX 470’s effective 3348MHz. Total memory is 1024MB and the memory bandwidth is 102.6 GB/s which is a hefty drop from the GeForce GTX 480’s 177.4 GB/s. Texture fill rate is also down when compared to the other Fermi Cards. The Thermal Design Power has also been cut by 20% when compared to the GeForce GTX 480. Now there is even less of a chance of cooking an egg! If you are looking for a great article that goes into a lot more depth about the GF100 architecture Legit Reviews.com has a great article that can be found here.

As you most likely noticed in the image above, we are fortunate enough to have two different NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465’s to play with today. The top card is an EVGA GeForce GTX 465 SC Edition. This is a factory overclocked version of the GTX 465. The bottom card is a Galaxy GeForce GTX 465. As you can tell from the image, the Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 breaks away from the reference cooler and has a very sharp look to it. The cooler on the Galaxy GeForce GTX 465 has some unique features that we will cover in the up and coming pages!