Nvidia GeForce GTX 465 1 GB Review: Zotac Puts Fermi On A Diet

We've already crowned Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 the fastest (and most power-hungry) single-GPU card we've ever seen. Now the company is launching its GeForce GTX 465, based on the same massive GF100 GPU. Can such a complex part compete with AMD's value?

GeForce GTX 480, Nvidia’s flagship, is already a bit of a derivative GPU. Its 480 CUDA cores represent almost 94% of the GF100’s full capacity, and the 448-core GeForce GTX 470 is almost 88% of GF100 running at full force (GF100 being a 512-core GPU, of course).

Today, Nvidia is both launching and making available a third card based on the 3+ billion-transistor GF100 GPU. Equipped with 352 CUDA cores, that’s a little more than two-thirds of the chip’s compute resources turned on. Using those numbers alone, we can actually get pretty close to determining how the GeForce GTX 465 performs, too. It turns out that if you average our benchmarks scores at 19x0x1200 for both cards with anti-aliasing turned on, the GeForce GTX 465 is about 66% as fast as the GTX 480.

But CUDA cores aren’t the only resources that get cut in this California budget crisis-style haircut. The GeForce GTX 465 also sits down to the table with 44 texture units and four ROP partitions capable of outputting thirty-two 32-bit integer pixels per clock. The card’s memory interface drops as well, from 320-bits on the GeForce GTX 470 to 256-bits here, hosting 1GB of GDDR5 memory.

New Kid On The Block

The GeForce GTX 465 is the high school freshman of the discrete graphics market, trying to figure out where it fits in. Nvidia is slapping a $279 recommended price tag on the card, suggesting that, in the face of $290 and $300 Radeon HD 5850s, this card is a potent performer with a strategically-lower price to draw in enthusiasts.

But we already know that the GeForce GTX 470 does battle with the Radeon HD 5850, definitely offering better performance for an extra $50 or $60. Crap. We haven’t even started in with benchmarks and this is already looking like an awkward movie moment.To be fair, Nvidia maintains that the GeForce GTX 470 hits a price/performance sweet spot in the 400-series lineup. The GeForce GTX 465 isn't intended to challenge that.

So where does the GeForce GTX 465 fit in? Is it designed to do battle with the Radeon HD 5830—a card that didn’t get us particularly hot and bothered back when it launched in February? Although the Radeon HD 5830 doesn’t offer significantly more performance than an older Radeon HD 4890, at least it’s available for $220 or so.

According to Nvidia, the GeForce GTX 465 slots right in between the Radeon HD 5850 and 5830. But with a price tag that creeps right up into the 5850’s business, the new card’s performance needs to be much closer to the GeForce GTX 470 than a first glance at specifications suggests it’ll fall.