Nvidia launched their much anticipated DX11 video cards about a month ago, the GTX 480 and the GTX 470, to much fanfare. We posted our review of the GTX 480, published by our own Senior editor Mark Poppin here, here and here. He concluded that the GTX 480 was the fastest single video card. Along with premiere performance comes a premiere price tag of $499 MSRP. This price tag is out of the range of many users and casual gamers who are not looking to play at the highest resolutions but still want the new features such as DX11 and hardware tessellation. For them Nvidia is launching the GTX 465 today which is built from the same GPU and technology powering the GTX 480 and the GTX 470. The GTX 465 will be Nvidia’s attack on the mid-range $200-$300 price segment in between the HD 5830 and the HD 5850 pricing. This is a hard launch with the boards available for purchase even before launch on Newegg.com. Link.

The GPU in the GTX 465 is the same as the one used in the GTX 470 and the GTX 480. This is possible due to the industrial practice of die harvesting the GPUs that do not have fully functional units to make up the required number of Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) for the GTX 470 and the GTX 480. These GPUs can be used in GTX 465 by disabling the defective SMs. Each Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) contains 32 stream processors. For example, the GTX 480 has one SM disabled which leaves it with 480 stream processors instead of the expected 512 (The GPU in the GTX 480 has 16 SMs). Similarly, the GTX 470 has 2 SMs disabled giving it 440 stream processors. In addition, the GTX 465 has 5 SMs disabled leaving it with 352 stream processors. The memory bus width has also been reduced to 256-bit from the 320-bit for the GTX 470, while the clocks remain the same as the GTX 470.

It will be interesting to see the GTX 465 compete with the GTX 275 and the HD 5830. The GTX 275 in comparison to the GTX 465 has fewer stream processors but higher memory bus width giving it a higher bandwidth. The HD 5830 uses higher clocked GDDR5 memory at the same memory bus width as the GTX 465 which gives it a bandwidth similar to that of GTX 275.

About Galaxy

Galaxy, established in 1994, is a Nvidia Add-in-Board (AIB) partner which manufactures products from the low-end GeForce 7200 series to the high-end GTX200 series. They manufacture products based on Nvidia’s reference design as well as using their own in-house production facilities to manufacture graphic cards based on their own designs using high-end coolers from Arctic Cooling and others.

Galaxy has shipped to the US for a long time as they built video cards for many of the tier 1 brands in the market today. They realized they could create a brand for themselves and save the end customer the middleman fees.  Two years ago they launched Galaxy in the US and their products are now available at Best Buy, Microcenter, Fry’s, Dell.com, Newegg, TigerDirect and many other sites.  They have excellent quality and toll-free tech support with a 2 year transferable no-registration warranty.

Closer Look

Here are the unboxing videos and a look at the card itself. I take off the cooler in the second video. Please watch it in 1080p for the highest quality. If you like this video please rate it and subscribe to our channel.

Now let’s take a look at the card.

The card arrived in a fairly-decent sized box. The Galaxy GTX 465 is featured on the cover of the box which is in contrast to some video card boxes featuring unrelated CGI characters on the cover. The cover makes the user very well aware of the unique design of this video card, which is the flip fan. In addition to featuring their unique design, the user can also see that the video card uses 1 GB of GDDR5 memory and offers CUDA and PhysX support from the cover of the box. Other key features and system requirements are listed on the side of the box.

The other side of the box shows what’s included in the box as well as the output display connectors on the video card. The inclusion of a mini-HDMI connector is a strange occurrence as I have seen full HDMI connectors on most video cards before. However, it is a relief for the user that Galaxy ships the video card with a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter cable.

The video card itself looks like something that may have escaped from a military base because of the look of the plastic shroud. It reminds me of the Humvee. The fan is fixed on to this plastic shroud.

The output display configuration – 2x Dual Link DVI , 1 Mini-HDMI can be seen above.

The Galaxy GTX 465 is rated for a TDP of 200W and is powered by two six-pin connectors.

The name of the video card is listed on the cooler, which is the first time I have seen that. The cooler also mentions, that a Fermi GPU is resident inside. PhysX, CUDA, DX11, minimum PSU requirement, 3D Vision support are also printed on the cooler which gives this video card a very unique look.

Here is the flip fan that is the unique design feature of this card. The dust that may accumulate on the fan during its operation can be cleaned by simply flipping it. The fan also features a blue LED which adds Bling! factor to the card.

The back of the video card does not feature any memory chips. All the video memory chips are placed on the front side of the PCB.

Here is the video card without its cooler. Galaxy uses eight 128 MB chips to make up the 1 GB GDDR5 memory. As seen on the PCB, two memory chips are missing. This is most likely due to this PCB also being used for manufacturing the GTX 470.

Also pictured on the right, the card uses 5+1 phase for its power circuitry which should allow for some interesting overclocking.

Here is the heatsink block that cools the GPU. It uses four heatpipes emanating from the cooper block that remains in contact with the GPU. In our testing, this heatsink does a very good job of keeping the GPU cool, even when it is overclocked.

Test Setup

• Intel Q9450 @ 3.6 GHz
• GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4 F5 BIOS
• GEIL 4 GB (2x 2GB) Dual Channel RAM @ 900 MHz
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• ATI Catalyst 10.4
• Nvidia Geforce Driver 197.45 for GTX 275, Geforce Driver 197.75 and 257.17 Beta for GTX 465
• Cooler Master Sniper Case

The HD 5830 was tested by my fellow editor Leon Hyman on his test system for this review. Here is his test setup:

• Intel Q9550 @ 3.6 GHz
• ASUS P5E Deluxe X48 (Rampage Formula BIOS)
• G.SKILL 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2-1000 PQ @ 900 MHz
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• ATI Catalyst 10.5
• Cooler Master Sniper Case

Test Notes

• PhysX was disabled in the Nvidia Control Panel.
• All Catalyst & Nvidia control panel settings were at default.
• The bars in the charts represent the total of the minimum, average and maximum FPS.

GPU-Z Shots

Temperature

We fired up our copy of Furmark 1.8.0 and rendered the fur at 640×480 with no AA on “xtreme burning mode”.

Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests that a GPU can run. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark.

According to its developer, “Furmark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why Furmark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”

Furmark was left running for a period of 10 minutes after which the final load temperature was measured. The ambient temperature was 24-25C.

The cooler on the GTX 465 does a good job on keeping the video card cool, and even under Furmark 100% load, it only goes up to 79C.

Overclocking

Furmark Stability test was used to find the maximum stable overclock. The fan was left running at 100% to keep the GPU temperatures as low as possible and allow maximum possible overclock.

For overclocking this video card, I had to download version 1.6 Beta 5 of MSI Afterburner, which adds support for Nvidia GTX 4xx cards. This tool can be downloaded from here. I started overclocking by increasing the clocks 10 MHz at a time. The overclocking was quite an experience as it took a long time because the video card just would not stop overclocking. It kept going on and on. Finally, I was able to overclock it from 608 MHz/1215 MHz/3348 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory) to 790 MHz/1580 MHz/4000 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory) which gives us an overclock of 30%/30%/25% on core, shader and memory respectively. This is an amazing overclock. Voltage control is not possible on this card, otherwise an even greater overclock would have been possible.

As you can notice that we are maxed out on the core clock in the Afterburner tool. To verify if I could increase the core clock more than 790 MHz, I downloaded Nvidia system tools which also allow overclocking. The Nvidia system tools can be downloaded from here. Unfortunately, core clock was not stable above 790 MHz. If the voltage control was allowed on this card, I’m sure we could increase the core clock above 790 MHz.

Power Usage (Total System Consumption)

Furmark 1.8.0 was run in extreme burning mode with the fur rendered at 640×480 with no AA. Measuring power usage with Furmark is the worst case scenario. Normally games are never able to put this much load on the GPU as Furmark does.

As you can see, the GTX 465 is more efficient than the last generation GTX 275. The GTX 465 uses 140 watts of power in idle mode, which is almost the same as the GTX 275, but under load it uses 308 watts which is around 60 watts less than the GTX 275 under load.

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

The GTX 465 comes out ahead of every other card in this review with the new drivers in this benchmark.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.
For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Vacant” map. The demo was recorded while trying to capture some of the most graphically intense sections of the game, like throwing a smoke grenade and then walking and shooting in it, which really brings all the cards to their knees resulting in the minimum FPS. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console. The results were then recorded with FRAPS.

Surprisingly, the GTX 275 leads the GTX 465 by quite a margin in this benchmark. Only when overclocked, can the GTX 465 catch up to the GTX 275. The HD 5830 and the HD 4890 both trail the GTX 465.

Crysis Warhead

Crysis series is one of the most beautiful set of games to grace our PC screens to date and they can bring the highest end PCs to their knees.

Crysis Warhead, developed by Crytek, is an expansion to the original Crysis. Crysis Warhead follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes, a formerly Non-Playable Character (NPC) from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island which is during the time period of the first game.

Framebuffer Crysis Warhead benchmark tool was used for testing. 64-bit executable was used with DX9, 0xAA and all gamer settings. The level that we benched is ‘Ambushed’.

All the stock clocked cards provide nearly equal performance in this benchmark. Only when the GTX 465 is overclocked, does it manage to pull ahead of the rest of the pack.

Dirt 2

Officially known as Colin Mcrae: Dirt 2, this game carries on the long tradition of Colin Mcrae series. Since taking on the Dirt moniker, this game has expanded from just rally racing to include a lot of off-road events. Powered by the EGO engine, the PC version of the game was delayed to include DX11 features such as hardware tessellation. Addition of DX11 features makes Dirt 2, one of the first games to support DX11.
We are using the retail game which includes an official benchmark.

The GTX 465 leads the HD 5830 and the HD 4890 by around 17 FPS and 22 FPS on average FPS respectively while the GTX 275 trails by 6 FPS in DX9 mode. In DX11 mode, the HD 5830 performs nearly equal to the GTX 465.

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a free roaming first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Although it uses the name of the original Far Cry game, the similarities end right there. Far Cry 2 is a completely different story set in a completely different environment.

Far Cry 2 uses the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft’s Montreal development team for Far Cry 2.  Dunia means “world”, “earth” or “living” in Arabic but also used in many languages with Arabic loanwords including Punjabi, Persian, Nepali, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili.  To portray the African setting in the game as realistically as possible, the development team went to Africa to study how things work there. The Dunia engine features Dynamic Weather, dynamic fire propagation (influenced by weather system), realistic fire, physics, full day/night cycles. Realistic fire is a high point of this game. It has the best looking depiction of a fire in a video game to date. The engine takes advantage of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 technologies.

I used the benchmark tool that comes with the game.

The GTX 465 wins this battle against the GTX 275, HD 4890 and the HD 5830. When overclocked, the GTX 465 continues to show very impressive increase in performance.

HAWX

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (”High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircraft and fly them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with satellite data. This game is a more of an arcade take on flying, with the aircraft able to do drifts in mid air like a car does on the road. The controls are easy with the aircraft handling more like a car but it is an immensely fun game.

The GTX 275 trails the GTX 265 buy around 13 FPS, largely due to lack of support for DX10.1 which increases FPS with Anti-Aliasing. The HD 4890 is the only card that can compete with the GTX 465.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is an action video game developed by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive. It carries on the sandbox style gameplay introduced by the first game in this series in 2006 which allowed to player to roam freely around an island and travel horizontally and vertically. Just Cause 2 uses the Avalanche 2.0 engine, which is an updated version of the engine used in the original game. This newer version of the engine only supports DX10.0, therefore the game only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. In addition to offering very realistic and immersive visuals, the game allows the player to freely roam the island on any modes of transport without necessarily adhering to a storyline.

We are using the benchmark included in the Just Cause 2 demo for our testing purposes.

The GTX 465 wins here again by at least 6 FPS against every other card tested. I’m really beginning to like the GTX 465 when it is overclocked, as it notches up another 15 FPS when overclocked and continues to show brilliant performance when overclocked.

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil is one of the longest spanning video game series. The popularity of this series can be judged from the release of three Hollywood movies, comics, novels and 25 games in the series spanning a variety of platforms. We are testing the latest game in this series to grace the PC platform. The PC version has some new content compared to the console versions including, “new costumes and a new and improved mercenary’s mode with three times as many enemies.” This game features support for Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision glasses. According to Capcom, RE5 will also be the first PC game to include support for “Stereoscopic 3D in all of its cut scenes.”

A 3D Vision Benchmark has been made available at nzone website for those of you looking to try out 3D Vision without buying the game. You can still run the benchmark even if you don’t have Nvidia’s 3D Vision Hardware, but you won’t be able to enjoy the 3D Vision effects. We are using this benchmark to test our hardware.

The GTX 275 ends up closer to the GTX 465 than any other card on this benchmark. The HD 5830 is beaten by almost 10 FPS. When overclocked, the GTX 465 gains another 15 FPS.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat is first-person shooter game developed by Ukranian game developer GSC Game World and is the sequel to STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. It is also the third game in the successful STALKER series. The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is one of the first games to support Microsoft’s DirectX 11 technology and sets a new benchmark in the image quality and realism in graphics possible on the PC platform. The game developers have released an official benchmark for this game which can be downloaded from here. This benchmark is based on one of the in game locations – Pripyat . The testing process includes four stages, those utilizing various weather and time of the day settings (day, night, rain, bright sun). In order to test your system thoroughly the benchmark is provided with a number of presets and options including different versions of DirectX (9.0, 10.0, 11), screen resolutions, antialiasing etc, all at your disposal.

We are using this benchmark for this review. The results reported below are from the “Day” stage of this benchmark.

The HD 5830 surprisingly beats the GTX 465 and the HD 4890 in DX10.1 mode and the GTX 465 in DX11 mode. The GTX 465 is able to take a commanding lead over the HD 5830 in DX 10.1 mode when overclocked.

Stone Giant DX11 Tech Demo

Stone Giant is a DX11 tech demo based on the upcoming DirectX11 game engine BitSquid Tech. Key features of the BitSquid Tech (PC version) include:

• Highly parallel, data oriented design
• Support for all new DX11 GPUs, including the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400 Series and AMD Radeon 5000 series
• Compute Shader 5 based depth of field effects
• Dynamic level of detail through displacement map tessellation
• Stereoscopic 3D support for NVIDIA 3DVision

This tech demo also contains a benchmark and can be downloaded from here. When the demo doesn’t detect a DX11 video card in the system, it falls back to DX10 render path. We tested our DX11 video cards in DX10 mode by disabling the DOF field effect and tessellation was disabled from the launcher.

This is another benchmark where the HD 5830 beats out the GTX 465 in DX11 mode, but this time it looses badly in DX10 mode.

PhysX Fluidmark Benchmark

PhysX FluidMark is a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA PhysX engine. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the rendering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation.

In this benchmark it is interesting to note that the Q9450 @ 3.6 GHz provides roughly one-fourth the power of a GTX 275. The GTX 465 shows increase in PhysX simulation performance over the GTX 275 as expected.

Badaboom Video Converter Benchmark

We intended to cover video encoding on the GPU, but the latest available version of Badaboom doesn’t work with GTX 4xx GPU. We hear that elemental technologies are working on a latest version that works with Nvidia GTX 4xx cards. We will look into this at a later date.

Conclusion

Today Nvidia has successfully launched a mid range card for the gamers who are not willing to pay $349 for the GTX 470. For $70 less ($279), you can buy the GTX 465. However, it is only $20 cheaper than the HD 5850 which should provide better performance. The GTX 465 is expected to slot in between the HD 5830 and the HD 5850 in terms of price and performance. At the last moment, Nvidia informed us that in partnership with select participating retailers, they will be offering a free download copy of Just Cause 2 game which is a $50 value. I believe this adds substantial value to the card.

In our testing, the GTX 275 was uncomfortably close the to the GTX 465 at stock speeds in terms of performance. From a mid range card of a new generation and one with more stream processors, we would expect better performance. I believe there are two reasons why the GTX 465 is so close to the GTX 275 in terms of performance.

1. Please see the table below. As a result of having a wider memory interface, the GTX 275 has a higher memory bandwidth. The GTX 275 also has a better texture fill rate.

2. After overclocking the GTX 465, we saw very impressive gains on average FPS. The gains ranged from 10 FPS to even 16 FPS. This leads me to believe that the GTX 465 is bandwidth starved.

My advice to the manufacturers would be to come out with overclocked editions of the GTX 465 as it offers a lot of performance increase. Fortunately, our review sample from Galaxy was a champion overclocker which allowed me to verify this theory. Even though this card did not allow me to change the GPU voltage, I was still able to overclock it from 608 MHz/1215 MHz/3348 MHz (Core/Shade/Memory) to 790 MHz/1580 MHz/4000 MHz (Core/Shade/Memory) which gives us an overclock of 30%/30%/25% on core, shader and memory respectively. With a voltage increase I’m sure the core could overclock more.

For the users who currently own a GTX 275, the GTX 465 will provide you almost similar performance in DX9 and DX10 games. However, it will also allow you to play DX11 games with the potential of unlocking hidden potential by overclocking. As the GTX 465 is fabricated on a 40nm process, it also consumes less power than the GTX 275.

If I was in the market looking to buy a new DX11 card in the $200-$300 price range, I would very seriously consider the GTX 465 as it sits right in between the less expensive and slower HD 5830 and more expensive and faster HD 5850. In the end, the decision will be up to you, the user, if you would like a card that supports AMD’s Eyefinity technology or NVIDIA’s PhysX.

Galaxy GTX 465

Pros-

• Great Overclocker
• Flip fan design is very innovative
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable adapter is included
• The fan is quiet and comes with a blue LED!
• “Just Cause 2” offered by select retailers in partnership with Nvidia

Cons –

• No voltage modification capability
• Performance too close to the last generation GTX 275

I would like to award this card ABT Overclocker Award and ABT Innovation Award for the unique design by Galaxy.

«1. Introduction2. Closer Look, Unboxing Video3. Test Setup, Test Notes, GPU-Z Shots4. Galaxy GTX 465:Temperature5. Galaxy GTX 465 Overclocking6. Galaxy GTX 465 Power Usage 7. 3DMark Vantage8. Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare9. Crysis Warhead10. Dirt 211. Far Cry 212. HAWX13. Just Cause 214. Resident Evil 515. STALKER: Call of Pripyat16. Stone Giant17. PhysX Fluidmark Benchmark18. Badaboom Video Converter19. Conclusion20. View All»