Today NVIDIA launches their GeForce GTX 465 series. So like all other GeForce GTX 400 cards so far, the GeForce GTX 465 is based on GF100 Fermi chipset. NVIDIA positions their latest child into the sub-$300 market with an estimated street price of $279. Zotac has sent us their GeForce GTX 465 which is the same as any other reference design, with the only difference being the sticker on the cooler and the bundle. In order to meet their price to performance target, NVIDIA has disabled large sections of their GF100 chipsets. This approach also gives NVIDIA the opportunity to sell GPU's that didn't qualify to be used on higher-end cards, and as such recuperate some of the yields at lower costs. - techPowerUp

Zotac GeForce GTX 465 Fermi Graphics Style Review

Zotac's package has a little hole on the front through which you can see the top of the card. The back has further general information about the board with info in multiple languages. These NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 is identical to the GeForce GTX 470, using the same PCB design and cooling solution. What's different is that the GPU operates at different specifications and the sticker on the cooler. You may combine up to four GeForce GTX 465 graphics cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings. And with these GeForce GTX 400 series the HDMI has fully integrated sound features.

The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 shows some interesting benchmark results. Generally it does very well against the competition at lower resolutions but it seems to run out of steam once the resolution is increased. We are not saying that the card gets slower at higher resolutions, but it does so with much larger steps. When comparing to ATI's offerings where the direct competition is their Radeon HD 5850 or lower, the card sits right in the middle of these video cards performance and price wise. And while we see the same trend here too, where performance drops with resolution increase but just a little less outspoken.

Another benchmark curiousity is that the results seems to differ vastly between benchmarks, sometimes the GeForce GTX 465 is much faster than the Radeon HD 5850, sometimes it ends up being slower than the Radeon HD 5830. If you are not afraid of some manual tweaking then it is easy to gain a nice amount of extra performance by overclocking the card. Whereas the memory overclock was quite disappointing, the GPU itself could reach the same clocks that we have seen on the GeForce GTX 480. Of course due to the disabled sections the actual gain from overclocking is less in proportion when doing a comparison.

When looking at pure price to performance, without the requirement of DirectX 11, the Radeon HD 4890 and the GeForce GTX 275 seem to be the best deals right now. But if you must have DirectX 11, then the GeForce GTX 465 becomes a valid choice. Personally we find NVIDIA's price point of $279 a just bit high, something like $249 or less would have been more appealing to many users who are torn between ATI and NVIDIA now. On the other hand we are sure that ATI has so much margins on the Radeon HD 5830 that a price war would be bad for both companies, and that wouldn't be the best strategy.