Introduction

A couple of months ago, we looked at the Geforce GTX 460 OC from Gigabyte, and I must admit I was completely blown away but its performance. What makes Nvidia's Geforce GTX 460 graphic cards so appealing, is that it offers one of the best price/performance ratios currently on the market. In fact, its performance is so good, an overclocked version of the GTX 460 can outperform its bigger brother ... the Geforce GTX 465. 

This may sound very exciting for the enthusiasts and gamers, especially when you can get a cheaper overclocked version of the GTX 460 that can outperform the slight more expensive GTX 465. However, for the average consumer ... I think it might be very confusing. Generally, higher model numbers tend to dictate its higher performance over lower model numbers. I for one, would have bought the GTX 465 over the GTX 460 without even thinking. But as it turns out ... this isn't the case between the GTX 460 and GTX 465. In fact, it's quite the opposite. For this reason, many hardware review websites on the internet have questioned Nvidia's intentions ... what the hell are they doing?

In my opinion, Nvidia should have discontinued the Geforce GTX 465 when they introduced the Geforce GTX 460. But I guess its too late for that, because Nvidia has probably built up large inventories/stocks which they need to clear. In the end, its the manufacturers and vendors that have to suffer. So let me tell you guys ... doing business with Nvidia is no fun ;)

Looking at the specifications of the Geforce GTX 465 GPU, it's odd to see that the GTX 460 actually has more to offer. Both GPUs comes with all the innovative features which Nvidia have been pushing, such as the support for SLI, CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. The only real difference I can see, is that the Geforce GTX 465 can support 3-way SLI and comes with a higher number of processing cores. Looking at the table below you can see that the graphics clock, processor clock, texture fill rate and memory bandwidth for the GTX 460 are all higher than its bigger brother GTX 465. It's kind weird to see the reverse happening here.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at the MSI Geforce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II 1Gb GDDR5 (N465GTX). It features a standard GTX 465 GPU which runs at 607Mhz, and comes with 1Gb of GDDR5 ram clocked at 1603Mhz. It uses a 256-bit memory interface, and has a total of 352 procesing cores (as described in the table above). It offers all of Nvidia's advanced graphic technologies including the support for 3-way SLI, CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.0, PhysX, Nvidia's 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration.

For cooling, MSI have included their own in-house designed GPU cooler, which they claim can offer upto 16℃ lower in termperature over reference designs. The Twin Frozr II feature a GPU cooler that has a large Nickel-plated copper base for better dissipation, as well as five heat pipes with SuperPipe Technology. It certainly looks very impressive, but it perform as good as it looks?

I can tell you from that start ... don't expect the Geforce GTX 465 to beat an overclocked GTX 460. It's quite the opposite. It should however, outperform all Radeon HD 5770 graphic cards in our tests. You do have the advantage of 3-way SLI support, which the GTX 460 don't offer.

We'll be testing the MSI Geforce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II (N465GTX) on our test rig, which consists of the following ... Intel Core i5 - 650 (LGA 1156), MSI P55A Fuzion motherboard, 4Gb Crucial Ballistix Tracer, Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler and a Silverpower 650w power supply. All-in-all, a decently spec'd computer system.

OK, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the MSI Geforce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II (N465GTX) with 1Gb GDDR5 ...

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