Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
I think the proper thing to say here is that this has to be the best GeForce GTX 465 we tested in our labs to date. But that by itself doesn't change my opinion on the overall price vs performance ratio though. Fact remains that ATI has NVIDIA pinned down in-between the R5830 and R5850, in both performance and price.
The GeForce GTX 465 is priced at 279 EUR/USD, and at that price level the card should be competing with the Radeon HD 5850 which just started selling at 265 EUR/USD and realistically, the GeForce GTX 465 at default clock speeds is just no match for that cheaper Radeon HD 5850. That simply is the biggest issue for the GTX 465 series.
The MSI Twin Frozr II edition graphics card, which is a nice redesign, is only 10 USD/EUR more expensive. But .. price performance wise compared to ATI's Radeon HD 5850 the GeForce GTX 465 simply remains a hard product to justify until prices will come down.
Now, if you do not care about the higher price tag and are an NVIDIA kinda guy, then we would like to state that this is one marvelously built GeForce GTX 465 -- the card comes with quality component usage, it is very silent, the cooling performance is good, the temperatures very respectable. Obviously we can't leave out the fact that it is a good looking card as well. It's one deficit is that heat from the Twin Frozr II cooler is still ditched inside your PC and does not exhaust it's residual air outside the PC, that's a bit of a shame. So make sure you have a properly ventilated chassis. Other than that, two thumbs up alright.
The reference GTX 465 has already proven to be a realy good overclocker. Now when you arm the graphics card with MSI's AfterBurner overclock application like we have shown you, then you can gain a seriously massive overclock. Just pop your fan rotation to 60%, play around a little with GPU voltage, and slide up that core frequency gradually while stressing the card. Breaking 800 MHz should not be an issue as long as you use a little extra GPU voltage. Memory can be increase a little as well. You'll at the least force another hundred fifty MHz out of it giving the GTX 465 a nice extra chunk of performance, closing in and sometimes even surpassing the GeForce GTX 470.
So guys, there you have it. Again, the GTX 465 is a decent card to play your games with. The overclock potential is really good. Setup in SLI the scaling is actually really good, please check out an article on GTX 465 SLI performance right here.
Now when you combine all the features, options and tweakability versus performance, the MSI GeForce GTX 465 Twin Frozr II is a very respectable product. 
Fact remains though that unless CUDA and PhysX are the dominating decision maker for you, it's current retail price gives it a really hard time in the market as ATI's superb Radeon 5800 line-up matches the GTX 465 features, performance and most of all, makes the most sense price wise. But other than it's price level and that somewhat high TDP, there's nothing wrong with this GTX 465 Twin Frozr II. If it matches your requirements, expectations and budget we can certainly recommend it as amongst the very best GeForce GTX 465 cards we have tested to date.
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