NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 Debut: EVGA, ZOTAC

Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.

The GeForce GTX 465 cards consumed about the same amount of power as the much faster Radeon HD 5870 while under load, but about 20 more watts at idle (sitting at the Windows desktop). In comparison to the GeForce GTX 480, however, the 465s used much less power under load. As you may expect, due to their lower power cosumption, the GeForce GTX 465 doesn't generate quite as much heat and it runs much quiter than the 480 too. In fact, throughout our entire suite of benchmarks, we never heard the fan on the GTX 465s spin up to the point where they were louder than the stock Intel CPU cooler in our test rig.