If you concentrate on this particular element of the official specs, the GF100 chip doesn’t seem to be too “crippled” of a GPU. Yet the situation is a bit worse than it may seem, since, besides the lack of 160 CUDA cores compared to the stronger model, the number of ROP units has been reduced by 50% down to 32, which is the main guilty party for the performance drop. Texture units are also poorer here, the number being cut down by 16, which is around 25%. Cheaper models also tend to cut on the price by cutting on the memory department, and GTX 465 is no exception. The memory bus width has been nearly halved compared to GTX 480, which has around 178 GB/s, while the new model pulls no more than 103 GB/s, with its 256-bit bus and a somewhat slower GDDR5 memory. With a specifications list such as this, it’s clear that GTX 465 would have to be significantly slower than the “House of Lords”. Simply put, the texture fillrate has had to suffer a backdrop, and this is usually the first thing that impacts game performance. Power consumption seems decent, nothing out of the ordinary, although greater than what the direct competitor in the form of Radeon HD 5850 requires. Knowing that the 250 W-declared GTX 480 could go well over 300 W, we were very interested in seeing how GeForce GTX 465 would turn out to be.

The largish packaging contains cables, documentation, accompanying adapters and little else to attract your attention. The card is practically the referent model, different only by the cooler sticker. The cooling system of GTX 465 itself is almost identical to that of the GTX 470 model. This means that the plastic cover hides aluminium ribs, riddled by five heatpipes, and contains DirectTouch technology, which means that heatpipes are in direct connection with the GPU surface, eliminating the flat surface of the cooling body as the basis. The turbine fan isn’t too noisy, and the few slits on the back of the PCB ensure better air intake. The fan isn’t set up too aggressively, which ensures moderate noise levels even under maximum load. If you own a quality soundproof enclosure, it’s likely that you won’t even get to hear GTX 465.

The core of this card is the previously described version of the GF100 processor, with reduced performance and referent clocks. It’s made in the 40 nm production process, and since it’s a derivative product, not an entirely new GPU, it’s clear that the cooling had to remain the same as on GTX 470. The interesting thing is that the installed memory is signed by Samsung and declared to only 1 ns, which means that it can work at a clock of 1 GHz, or 4 GHz effectively. This was enough to get our hopes up as far as overclocking is concerned.