Zotac GTX 465 Review: Full-on, affordable Fermi?

Overclocking the GTX 465 proved to be extremely difficult as none of the applications available supported it – we did however get lucky with a beta of the Zotac Firestorm overclocking software. Although it was a little ‘crash happy', it did manage to let us overclock the card.

Using the Firestorm suite we were able to push the card to 820mhz on the core and 3700mhz on the memory. We will be delving into overclocking performance on the GTX 465 at a later date and putting it head to head with other overclocked cards from various partners.

For temperature testing, we set our air conditioned lab to 25 degrees and the Silverstone Raven 2’s case fans to ‘high’, ensuring maximum air flow across all of the components.

I have been singing the praises of the Raven 2 since it was released as it is one of the most thermally effective cases on the market with the tri 180mm fans blowing directly  from bottom to top. It appears even nVidia agree with me according to their reference reviewers guide.

At idle the card runs at a very comfortable 40c and to test load we ran a loop of Crysis Warhead (max settings) which recorded a final temperature of 82c. When overclocked this rose to 86 under load. Just to put that figure into perspective, at 82 degrees the GTX 480 would be reaching for a jumper – scared that it was about to catch a cold.

The card remained reasonably silent inside our chassis throughout all our testing. However, just out of interest, we manually cranked the GFX fan to 100% – and recorded noise of over 70db. Thankfully, under real world conditions, it never reaches this – being no louder than a reference 5850 card in normal use.

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