Review of Sparkle Nvidia Geforce GTX465 Video Card

If you’re a gamer then you know the video card is probably the most important part of your system, without a decent one you won’t be able to play those games that you love so much. The problem with good video cards is that they cost a lot of money, and a lot of us can’t afford them so most of us aim a little lower towards the more mid-range priced cards. I think one should be able to get a fairly decent card that will play most games at relatively high settings and not have to take out a loan or get a second mortgage to do it. Today for review I’ve got the Sparkle GeForce GTX465 video card, it’s a fairly big card, but most cards are these days that can provide good performance for your system. The best part about this card I think is the price, for about $200 you can get a fairly decent performing card.


The GTX465 comes in a fancy and shiny looking box and is well packaged.

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Inside you’ll find documentation, CD, VGA to DVI adapter, two molex to PCIE power connection and an HDMI cable.

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The card itself is big and colorful, purple and black wouldn’t be my color choices but hey whatever. The card has a nice big fan on it with copper heatpipes sticking out of the side. It’s a dual slot card as well.

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On the back end you’ll find to DVI ports and a mini-HDMI connection. I’m not too happy about the mini-HMDI connection though, what’s wrong with normal HDMI?

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Here’s the GTX465 with an ATI 4870 and a GT240.

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Specifications:

Geforce GTX465 Series – SXX4651024D5-NM

Model number : SXX4651024D5-NM
Graphics Processing : Geforce GTX465
Processor Cores : 352
Core Clock : 607 MHz
Memory Clock : 3206 MHz
Memory Type : 1024MB GDDR5
Memory Interface :     256Bit
Processor Clock : 1215 MHz
Bus Type : PCI-Express 2.0

Key Features:
-Microsoft DirectX 11 support
-NVIDIA CUDA technology with CUDA C/C++,DirectCompute  5.0 and OpenCL support
-NVIDIA PhysX technology
-NVIDIA SLI and 3-way SLI technology
-NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready
-NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology
-PCI Express 2.0 support
-Two Dual-link DVI-I connectors
-One Mini-HDMI 1.3a connector
-Dual-link HDCP-Capable
-OpenGL 4.0 Optimization and support

Price: $204.99 (price from NewEgg at time of review)


I’m using the GTX465 in my gaming computer which consists of DFI Lanparty X48-T3RS Motherboard, Intel C2Q9650 CPU, and 8 Gigs DDR3 Ram installed in a Lian-Li PC-8FI case.

Here it is installed:

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Before I installed the GTX465 I was using a GTX260, so that’s what I’m comparing it to.

We’ll start with a couple old favorites.

3DMark06:

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Somewhat of a better showing.

Now here’s 3Dmark Vantage set at Performance with the resolution changed to 1920×1080.

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Quite a bit better with the GTX465 in the system.

How about some Crysis with settings of 1920×1080, and 4X AA on High Quality.

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As expected not the best results, but the GTX465 does better than the GTX260.

Next up is Far Cry 2 with Settings: Demo(Ranch Small), 1920×1080 (60Hz), D3D10, Fixed Time Step(No), Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(4x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Very High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Very High), Terrain(Very High), Geometry(Very High), Post FX(High), Texture(Very High), Shadow(Very High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

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Oddly the GTX465 has lower minimum FPS than the GTX260, but the performance is still very good.

I’ve never used the HAWX2 benchmark so I figured why not give it a try. Settings for testing were 1920-x1080, Everything on high and AA set to 16xQ CSAA.

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Very playable at those frame rates I would say with either card.

Mafia II is a game that involves Physics, so I figured why not use that one for testing as well. Setting were basically everything on HIGH at 1920×1080 with AA on and Anisotropic Filtering set to 16x. I ran three different tests at the available physics settings of off, medium and high.

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Obviously having a physics card paired with the HTX465 would be a good thing here as neither card did too well with the Physics on.

The last test I ran, another that I never ran before, is the Unigine Tropics Benchmark with settings of 1920×1080, shaders on high, Anistropy at 8x and AA on 8x.

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There’s a rather big difference in the Max FPS as you can see here.

The card seems quiet, even under load I couldn’t hear the fan.


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Conclusion:
I think the performance of the GTX465 is decent overall and I’m very happy with it. The cost is relatively low for it, and I think anyone who does purchase this card will be happy with it.

For most game today though I think it should be paired with another card, especially one for physics.

The one gripe I do have is the mini-HDMI port, why use mini and not standard?! Yes they do include a cable but it’s barely long enough for my needs, and I’m sure it will be too short for others.

9recommended5

Pros:
+Low price
+Decent performance
+Includes HDMI cable

Cons:
-Mini DVI Connection
-Included HDMI cable might be too short for some
-Large sized card

Grades:
Overall score-9-10
Design score-9-10
Performance score-9-10

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