Zotac GeForce GTX 465 Video Card Review

We looked at NVIDIA’s Fermi based GTX 480 some time back and compared their highest-end graphics card to ATI’s fastest single GPU card. While the card proved to be faster than ATI’s offering, it wasn’t enough to impress us- especially considering how hot and noisy it got. It was also quite expensive.

Today, we look at the mainstream version of Fermi- the GTX 465 that was sent to us by Zotac and we compare it to an ATI product in a similar price and spec range.

Packaged in the traditional orange box that we’ve seen for almost all Zotac cards to date, the Zotac GeForce GTX 465 comes with two molex to PCI-E power converter cables as well as a DVI to DSUB converter and a mini HDMI to HDMI converter. A quickstart quide is also included along with the drivers CD that  has trial versions of applications like Badaboom, SuperLiloscope and vReveal that utilize the NVIDIA GPU to encode and edit videos as well as enhance pictures.

The Zotac GeForce GTX465 card is priced at US$270 or AED 1,000 but its selling for around at AED 1500 in the local market from the phone calls we made. The price is comparable to the ATI Radeon HD5850 that is also selling for around the same price locally. Thus we chose to compare these two cards in performance but before we head over to the benchmarks, let compare their specs.

	NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 465	AMD/ATI RADEON HS 5850
Shaders	352	1440
ROPs	32	32
Core Clock	607MHz	725MHz
Memory Size	1024MB	1024MB
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit
Memory Clock	802MHz	1000MHz

As you can see, both the cards are close to each other in specs with the ATI Radeon 5850 featuring slightly higher core and memory clock speeds. Both of these cards require two six-pin PCI-Express power connectors and occupy two slots with their heatsinks on them. The Zotac GeForce GTX465 is a bit smaller in the size to the older GTX280 card from NVIDIA.