Introduction

NVIDIA's latest member of the GeForce 400 Series is the GeForce GTX 465. The card is based on the same GF100 "Fermi" GPU as the more powerful Geforce GTX 470 and GTX 480. Specs-wise there are some big differences, especially the number of shaders and and ROPs has been reduced considerably to meet NVIDIA's price/performance target.

MSI is the first add-in-board vendor to send us a fully customized GTX 465 design for review. As the name suggests, their GeForce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II is using MSI's famous Twin Frozr II cooler design. All other performance related specifications remain the same as the NVIDIA reference design. Pricewise not much has changed either, MSI ask a very reasonable $10 extra for their own cooling solution.

Packaging

MSI uses their well established package design on their GTX 465. Does the card on the front look like a gun with the muzzle flash on the front?

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• Mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter
• DVI to VGA adapter
• DVI to HDMI adapter
• 2x PCI-Express power cables

The Card

MSI's GTX 465 Twin Frozr II is dominated by the big shiny heatsink installed on it. Due to the heatsink design, the card extends a bit further toward the top than most other graphics cards. Since the difference is rather small, this shouldn't be a problem in almost all cases on the market.


Just like the NVIDIA reference design, the card occupies two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports and one mini-HDMI port. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), from what we know so far, on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to four GTX 465 cards in SLI for added performance or improved image quality settings.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.