NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 465: Cheaper Isn’t Always Better

Conclusion

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