NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better
by Ryan Smith on May 31, 2010 3:26 AM ESTConclusion
We opened this article stating that the “sweet spot” for NVIDIA was 93%. The GeForce GTX 465 is 93% of the price of the average Radeon HD 5850, so NVIDIA would want to deliver at least 93% of the performance. All told they come very close to this at 1920 and 1680, coming within 89% and 93% of a Radeon HD 5850 respectively, showcasing just how good of a job NVIDIA is doing positioning their cards as of late.
Unless you’re going to be gaming with a 30” LCD, NVIDIA has done an appropriate job of pricing the GTX 465 on a pure performance basis. For $280 you can have a GTX 465, or for 8% more you can have a card that performs 8% faster (the 5850). If that’s all you care about, stop here and figure out how much you wish to spend and you’ll be able to figure out which card you want.
However if we continue on, there’s an ugly truth to face: the GTX 465 delivers the GTX 470’s power and noise characteristics, but not the GTX 470’s performance. This is a critical difference because while we could make a case for the GTX 470 versus the 5850 based on the former’s superior performance, now we’re looking at a card that is slower than a 5850 but worse in every basic metric except price. The GTX 465 is much louder and much more power hungry than the Radeon 5850 all while being slower – and all you save is $20.
At this point it’s impossible to recommend the GeForce GTX 465 for the average buyer. The extra $20 for a Radeon HD 5850 will buy a card that is cooler, quieter, and appropriately faster. Unless you’re on an edge case and need to be in the NVIDIA ecosystem for a specific reason such as CUDA, 3D Vision, or DX10/11 transparency anti-aliasing (more on this later this week), a 5850 is going to be the better card. NVIDIA is going to have to drive the feature differences between the GeForce GTX 400 series and the Radeon HD 5000 series to sell the GTX 465, as performance won’t do it.
Meanwhile on a broader horizon, we noticed something interesting about the GTX 465: it’s really, really close to the GTX 285. In terms of gaming performance the difference is under 4%, while temperatures, power consumption, and even noise were all very close to NVIDIA’s last-generation king. Whether it was intentional or not, the GTX 465 feels like a GTX 285 with DirectX 11. At nearly 2 years old the GTX 285’s place in the world has been well established in most enthusiasts’ minds and the GTX 465 actually fits this mold nicely. This isn’t necessarily a good thing since we’ve moved on to 40nm and the Radeon HD 5000 series, but if you’ve ever wanted to know what a GTX 285 with DirectX 11 would be like, we would imagine it would be a lot like the GTX 465.
We'd like to once again thank Zotac for providing their GeForce GTX 465 for today's review
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multivac - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
also, you thanked Zotec at the endrscsr - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
I read earlier the GTX465 review at computerbase.de and the load temperatures and power are well of both GTX 465 are well below the GTX 470.could it be that there is something wrong with your GTX 465 or your GTX 470 has a particular low power draw?
Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
It's always possible.The primary issue is that the quality of chips coming off of a wafer are going to be variable in the best of times, and TSMC's situation is not quite that good. So between any two cards there can be a lot of variability, which is hard to account for when we only have a handful of any given card.
I do not believe that our GTX 465 is "damaged" in any way. It functions just fine. But it consumes a lot of power, and it's hot. We may have simply received a card with a poorer-than-average GPU, which would color our results.
As for our GTX 470, looking at some of the other reviews of it, I don't believe it's particularly exceptional.
For anyone curious, under FurMark the fan on our 470 stabilizes at 76%. On the GTX 465 it stabilizes as 80%. This is the primary reason why our GTX 465 is louder than our 470.
CPUGuy - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
"I read earlier the GTX465 review at computerbase.de and the load temperatures and power are well of both GTX 465 are well below the GTX 470.could it be that there is something wrong with your GTX 465 or your GTX 470 has a particular low power draw?"
Perhaps they were given a different sample card? Ever thought of that? You folks have to remember that these are not retail cards.
CPUGuy - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Why are you taking another review into consideration when they may have been given a different sample? I honestly don't think they had a retail version.MrSpadge - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
It's said somewhere in the article that nVidia is using different voltages for these chips. So there you have it: Anand tested one at the upper bound of the voltage range (a worse chip) whereas computerbase likely got one which was more in line with the voltage on the 470/480s.Yes, voltage can make such a difference in power draw.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
This review is sloppy and outright laughable at points. Although you state which Nvidia drivers used (3 of them) you clearly used different drivers and/or old benchmarks for the same game on many parts of the tests, despite the 257 drivers offering some noticeable across-the-board increases. Even if not by much, FPS scores should be slightly different and/or up. In some reviews, it was clear newer drivers were only used on certain cards as the gtx470 is way faster than the gtx480 at BFBC2. Nearly all the other benchmarks, though, have both cards scoring the exact same as they did at release.It's not an accurate, or credible, way to post a review. All tests should be done on the same configuration. same software, same hardware, same drivers. If you don't have time to rerun your gtx470/480 benchmarks with the latest drivers, then you should NOT include them in the review.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
And just to say, it's not that I disagree with your analysis on the gtx465, but if you are going to have huge graphs showing how all the cards perform and where they fit vs. their counterparts and rivals, those graphs need to be accurate and not using different configurations that will skew results.Ryan Smith - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
New drivers are always a thorny issue. In an ideal world I'd like to update our results with the latest drivers as they're released. But realistically it's 1-1.5 man-weeks of work to redo the entire benchmark suite and that's just not practical.As a result, for the most part we will keep the same results set for upwards of 6 months. If there's a significant change in performance due to a new driver we'll go ahead and rerun some numbers as necessary, which we have done for the 257.15 drivers. We will probably redo some more benchmarks, but it wasn't possible to get anything else done ahead of this review.
tviceman - Monday, May 31, 2010 - link
Well I think it's only fair, proper, and balanced to run all the cards with the same configuration. If you're unable to do so in the time frame alloted, then only include the cards which are in immediate competition and add more later.The BFBC2 benchmark looks plain WRONG with the gtx470 trouncing the gtx480. And since other gtx470 scores were exactly the same as your original review, it just looks like you randomly picked a few small benchmarks to update with the latest drivers, and left the rest untouched.
It just isn't accurate.