There are few comparisons to be made here, the first of which is the new GeForce GTX 465 pitted against the AMD Radeon HD 5850, both of which will be available in the $279-299 range. In our gaming tests we found that both cards brought the same gaming experience and performance in our array of titles. The NVIDIA offering did take a slight lead HAWX and Metro 2033 while the AMD Radeon option was faster in DiRT 2. Other than that, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference when seeing them side by side. This is not a coincidence people - NVIDIA has obviously tweaked the specs, clocks and pricing for this exact reason.

The next question is about the intra-NVIDIA comparison of the GTX 465 and the GTX 470. Amazingly, the change in specifications pretty much EXACTLY determined the performance differences between the two options as we saw clear 25-28% performance gaps between the GTX 465 and GTX 470 in all GPU-bottlenecked resolutions of our games. Considering there were 27% fewer shaders, 27% fewer texture units and 25% fewer ROPs that exactness is impressive. I guess we could have just skipped that whole multi-day testing process, huh??

The new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 brings the performance and features of the GF100 architecture to a lower price point and does a good job of making a case for itself against the competing AMD products. SLI performance also impressed us with scaling rates as high as 90% in some cases and with a base price of $279 could make for the first consumer-friendly option for NVIDIA Surround support coming later in the summer. The Galaxy version of this GPU is a custom design with a unique fan that is both quieter and more functional with a foldout mechanism for cleaning and maintenance. The Radeon HD 5850 still has a couple of features I wish we found in the NVIDIA options, like support for three displays, but that is somewhat offset by things like CUDA and PhysX that you might not use quite as often but are there only with NVIDIA. GF100 is finally becoming more accessible to the gaming enthusiast and Galaxy's custom design only adds to the package.