Setup | Noise | Power consumption | Heat levels

Hardware installation

Installation of both products is really easy. Once the card is installed and seated into the PC we connect the 6-pin a power connectors to the graphics card.

And yes... do make sure your power supply is compatible:

• GeForce GTX 465 needs two 6-pin PEG connectors
• GeForce GTX 470 needs two 6-pin PEG connectors
• GeForce GTX 480 needs one 6-pin PEG and one 8-pin PEG connector

Preferably the PEG headers come directly from the power supply and are not converted from the Molex peripheral connectors.

You can now turn on your PC, boot into Windows, install the latest NVIDIA Forceware driver and after a reboot, all should be working. No further configuration is required or needed.

Recommended Power Supply

Here is Guru3D's power supply recommendation:

GeForce GTX 465

• On your average system the card requires you to have a 500 Watt power supply unit.

GeForce GTX 400 in SLI

• A second card requires you to add another ~150 Watts. You need a 650 Watt power supply unit.

For each other card (3-way SLI) that you add, just add another 150 Watts as a safety margin.

There are many good PSUs out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• freezing during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

The graphics card cooler performance examined

Let's have a look at the temperatures this custom cooler offers.

primary temperatures and clocks during heavy stress

We now fire off a hefty shader application at the GPU and start monitoring temperature behavior as it would be when you are gaming intensely and continuously, we literally stress the GPUs 100% here as you can see in the graph.

We measured at a room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius. Now we report at two stages the GPU(s) in IDLE and under stress. Here's what we get returned:

Now the final GTX boards have gotten a new tweaked BIOS and that definitely shows.

As you can see the GTX 465 remains within acceptable heat levels. On SLI that will change on one card due to airflow though, add another 10 Degrees C once under massive stress.

Noise Levels coming from the graphics card

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, usually that heat needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two an imprecise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting.

For each dBA test we close the PC/chassis and move the dBA gun 75 cm away from the PC. Roughly the same proximity you'll have a PC in a real-world situation.

dBA

The idle noise levels coming from the card are normal as well, in idle you will hear the card as we measured 38 dBA, which is right below the threshold of noise coming from that PC itself.

Once the GPU starts to heat up the fan RPM will go up as well but the card does not become noisy. We measured roughly 42 dBA under heavy GPU stress. So that makes the card not silent but not noisy either... you can hear it in the background noise. So that definitely is looking much better.