Temperature & Acoustics / Power Consumption
For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.
We went into this review thinking the GTX 465 would exhibit the same acoustical profile as the GTX 470 but we were wrong. Instead of being moderately noticeable over the system fans, we didn’t hear a peep out of this new card even though it exhibited extremely good temperatures throughout testing. There are some fan speed increases every now and then but you likely won’t hear them unless you are playing a game without the sound enabled.
For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.
Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.
There is something very important to remember here: TDP is not max board power and vice versa. As such, the maximum amount of power a graphics card consumes can surpass its TDP values and that’s exactly what the GTX 470 and GTX 480 did in their testing. Luckily, the GTX 465 not only runs much cooler but it is much less power hungry than it bigger brothers as well. It still consumes slightly more than the higher-end HD 5870 but its numbers are more in-line with the GTX 285 and GTX 275 than past 400-series cards were.
Core Temperature & Acoustics
For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.
For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.

We went into this review thinking the GTX 465 would exhibit the same acoustical profile as the GTX 470 but we were wrong. Instead of being moderately noticeable over the system fans, we didn’t hear a peep out of this new card even though it exhibited extremely good temperatures throughout testing. There are some fan speed increases every now and then but you likely won’t hear them unless you are playing a game without the sound enabled.
System Power Consumption
For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.
Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.

There is something very important to remember here: TDP is not max board power and vice versa. As such, the maximum amount of power a graphics card consumes can surpass its TDP values and that’s exactly what the GTX 470 and GTX 480 did in their testing. Luckily, the GTX 465 not only runs much cooler but it is much less power hungry than it bigger brothers as well. It still consumes slightly more than the higher-end HD 5870 but its numbers are more in-line with the GTX 285 and GTX 275 than past 400-series cards were.
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