In recent years it’s become customary to have 3-4 high-end cards on the market at the same time using the same GPU. For the GTX 200 series we had the GTX 260, GTX 275, and GTX 285, while for the Radeon HD 5000 series we have the 5830, 5850, and 5870. With the launch of NVIDIA’s GTX 400 series last month NVIDIA filled in the first 2 spots in their lineup with the GTX 480 and GTX 470, with obvious room to grow out the family in the future.

Above the GTX 480 is of course the “full” GF100 with all of its functional units enabled, and which is still missing in action on both the consumer and HPC markets. However there’s also room for a card below the $350 GTX 470, particularly with AMD being the sole inhabitant of the “bargain” high-end $300 point. NVIDIA is to the point in the Fermi rollout where they want a piece of that market, and they have a stash of further-binned so-so GF100 chips they want to fill it with. This brings us to today, and the launch of the GeForce GTX 465.

 

  GTX 480 GTX 470 GTX 465 GTX 285
Stream Processors 480 448 352 240
Texture Address / Filtering 60/60 56/56 44/44 80 / 80
ROPs 48 40 32 32
Core Clock 700MHz 607MHz 607MHz 648MHz
Shader Clock 1401MHz 1215MHz 1215MHz 1476MHz
Memory Clock 924MHz (3696MHz data rate) GDDR5 837MHz (3348MHz data rate) GDDR5 802MHz (3208MHz data rate) GDDR5 1242MHz (2484MHz data rate) GDDR3
Memory Bus Width 384-bit 320-bit 256-bit 512-bit
Frame Buffer 1.5GB 1.25GB 1GB 1GB
Transistor Count 3B 3B 3B 1.4B
Manufacturing Process TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 40nm TSMC 55nm
Price Point $499 $349 $279 N/A

In a nutshell, if you take a GTX 470 and disable some additional functional units, additional memory controllers, and additional ROPs, while turning down the memory speed any further, you get the GTX 465. NVIDIA has shut off another 3 Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) from GF100, leaving the GTX 465 with 11 of them, giving it a total of 352 CUDA Cores/SPs, and 44 texture units. Meanwhile the ROPs have been cut down to 32 ROPs, and another memory controller disabled, making for a 256-bit memory bus attached to 1GB of 802MHz (3208MHz effective) GDDR5. All told the GTX 465 has around 78% of the texture/shader power of the GTX 470, 80% the ROP power, 76% of the memory bandwidth of the GTX 470, and 80% of the memory capacity. The loss of 256MB of RAM will be particularly interesting, as it means NVIDIA has surrendered its memory capacity advantage over AMD’s reference cards – both are even at 1GB.

 

With all of that in mind, compared to the GTX 470 the GTX 465 may be the more interesting card. While NVIDIA simply disabled some additional functional units compared to the GTX 480 to get the GTX 470, disabling even more functional units required a different strategy. Rather than disabling additional units from each of the GF100 GPU’s 4 Graphics Processing Clusters (GPCs), NVIDIA outright disabled one of the GPCs. This is the first time we’ve seen them disable a GPC on a GF100 card, making it an interesting first for Fermi. By disabling a GPC, not only does NVIDIA surrender CUDA cores, texture units, and polymorph engines, but they also surrender one of the 4 raster engines. As a result the GTX 465 takes a straight 25% hit in rasterization abilities compared to GTX 470, slightly greater than the loss for any other part of the GTX 465.


Top: GTX 465. Bottom: GTX 470

Along with similar clockspeeds as the GTX 470, the GTX 465 also shares the GTX 470’s design. It’s the same PCB and cooler – only the GPU has changed, with NVIDIA’s partners laying down one of NVIDIA’s GTX 465-binned GF100 GPUs.

With the disabling of additional functional units, the TDP has come down compared to the GTX 470. NVIDIA pegs the GTX 465 at 200W TDP, 15W below the GTX 470’s official TDP. We were not given the idle power consumption; however we’ll see quickly that it hasn’t improved when looking at our own power consumption numbers.

As we stated earlier, this is NVIDIA’s shot at the sub-$300 market, which is currently dominated by the Radeon HD 5850 at $289 and up, and the Radeon HD 5830 at $225 and up. Like the GTX 470, NVIDIA has built a product to slot in between AMD’s cards in terms of performance rather than taking AMD head-on, and the pricing reflects this. The MSRP of the GTX 465 is $279 accordingly, maintaining AMD and NVIDIA’s more-or-less neat division of the high-end market and putting the performance “sweet spot” for the GTX 465's performance at roughly 93% of the 5850.

Meanwhile this is the closest the two have come on pricing in quite some time, as a $279 MSRP puts the GTX 465 within $10 of the cheapest Radeon HD 5850. The pricing on the GTX 465 may change in the next month as NVIDIA’s North American partners are currently packing in Just Cause 2 with the card (a last-minute deal as we understand it), so there may be some flexibility on pricing once that promotion ends and NVIDIA’s partners no longer have to chip in for the game.

Finally, this is a hard launch, a very hard launch. In fact the cards started showing up on etailers 2 days before our NDA expired. After the farce that was the GTX 480/470 launch, it’s fantastic to see a proper hard launch. As far as we can tell you won’t have any problem finding a GTX 465 – thanks in large part to what looks to be quite the stockpile of GF100 GPUs that only meet GTX 465 specifications.

Meet Zotac’s GeForce GTX 465
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  • BoFox - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    10.5's offer almost zero performance improvements over 10.3a. Remember, the 10.3 drivers already brought the largest boost to 5xxx cards since they came out in October.
  • Lapoki - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    With the latest series from ATI and nVidia one thing that didnt happen at all were the price wars. I loved watching that with the last gen and remember the day when i almost purchased a non-reference 4890 for just $179.
    Then came the 58XX and i thought i'd wait for nVidia's response which took quite a while but in the end i was sorely dissapointed. It looked like both teams had decided upon a performance point to target with a price
    $250 - HD 5830
    $280 - GTX465
    $300 - HD 5850
    $350 - GTX470
    $400 - HD5870
    $500 - GTX480
    Is it just me or these alternating figures look fishy?

    In the end, after delaying my purchase by quite a few months, i gave up and bought a 5850 for ~$280 and i have to say i really like its performance though wish i it was cheaper by $30-$40.
    Also, this is my first ATI or for that matter non-nVidia card in 12 years.
  • BoFox - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    Yeah! Nvidia is deliberately avoiding price wars by avoiding the exact same price categories this time around.

    ATI's Southern Islands (HD 6770) is due in a couple months or less, since it already taped out. It will give GTX 480 a spanking, for sure.
  • ragejg - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    In my GTX 465 review for nVNews I took an average for a 1 minute run in a repeatable firefight in SP, and a 1 minute run in a full MP server. How did you guys do the BC2 benching? Could you explain what the waterfall benchmark entails, as well as the other one? I'd like to do a better job of benchmarking with this game.

    - john
    -nVNews Staff/Mod
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    The text and pictures from our GTX 480 review should do a good enough job explaining our test methodology.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforc...
  • Chalnoth - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    "Above the GTX 480 is of course the “full” GF100 with all of its functional units enabled, and which is still missing in action on both the consumer and HPC markets."

    What the hell are you smoking? As of the time of this post, all 10 GTX 480 products listed on newegg's website were ready for immediate shipping. Can you at least get your simplest facts straight?
  • silverblue - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    He said the "full" GT100, which offers 512 shader cores and not 480 as is the case with the 480. As such, I believe he's correct to make that statement.
  • silverblue - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    They used Catalyst v10.5, and the 5830 was far closer to the 465. In most games, it was behind at the lower resolutions, then ahead as you went higher. Pretty easy to conclude that, unless you're playing MW2, the 465 was a waste of time unless you wanted PhysX, CUDA and 3D gaming/BluRay.

    I know you use a different gaming test suite but I'm surprised that the 5830 is relatively nowhere on your test. Are you using AA at any point?
  • BoFox - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    Perhaps you are the owner of a 5830, but just check dozens of review sites out there and see for yourself how a 5830 is rather lackluster even compared to the 4890 (which is already slower than GTX 275 and 465 in overall DX9/10 games).
  • Slayeristight - Tuesday, June 1, 2010 - link

    I just lost a lot of respect for this website with the posting of these benchmarks. I looked at the 5830 number and they are very, very low. I compared the numbers from this review to the of the 5830 and they are a lot lower! How can this be with all the performance upgrades in the drivers that they have had. Also, while I am speaking of drivers, why not use the newest drivers for ATI? Why use AMD Catalyst 10.3a that is 2 driver releases old?

    If you messed up on the 5830 so bad how can I trust any of the other numbers that were put up for any of the other cards be it Nvidia or ATI?

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