Point of View GTX 465 review

• Introduction
• Technical specification
• Package content
• Testbed configuration
• Voltages and temperature level
• Voltage control
• Design features
• GTX 465 to GTX 470 modification
• Overclocking
• 3D Mark Vantage
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Crysis
• FarCry 2
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
• DIRT2
• Aliens vs Predator
• Conclusion

GTX 465 to GTX 470 modification

To unlock card’s hidden performance config and missing memory we will be using BIOS flashing method. First of all, download one of the versions of NVIDIA graphic card firmware editing tool — nvFlash (me personally prefer the DOS version, since I find firmware update under DOS to be more safer).

For a successful modification we need to complete three steps.

Save the original BIOS to file original.rom:
nvflash –save original.rom
Erase EEPROM area, otherwise we could not flash the arrays, responsible for performance config:
nvflash --eraseeeprom
Next, DO NOT perform any other actions, except for the next step to flash the BIOS:
nvflash -4 -5 -6 470.rom
here 470.rom — BIOS file.
During the following flashing process answer positively to all nvflash’s answer by clicking “Y”.

It is necessary to wait until the end of each operation and restart the system after the last operation is complete. Asus GTX 465 video card owners can use GTX 465 Upgrade Tool.

This tool checks BIOS for Asus vendor, therefore, if you have other vendor’s card the tool will reject BIOS modification. Action performed by this tool are the same we did manually. More info on GTX 465 Upgrade Tool can be found in our article.

We flashed GTX 465 with EVGA GTX 470 SuperClocked BIOS indeed, reinstalled card’s video drivers and saw the following information about our PoV GTX 465 card:

As we see, GTX 465 card became a full-fledged GTX 470 — 40ROPs, 448 CUDA processors and 1280 Mb of memory, higher GPU and memory clocks were inherited from EVGA GTX 470 Superclocked BIOS.
Checking info using MSI Afterburner:

Clocks correspond to EVGA GTX 470 SC, however, voltage value for 3d mode increased from 0.937 V as it was set for GTX 465 to 0.950 V after modification. The only thing left to do is to check whether the performance of GTX 465@GTX 470 changed.
In addition, once again we tried to flash our GTX 465 and GTX 470 cards with GTX 480 BIOS. The cards were flashed successfully and were fully working, BUT cards’ performance config haven’t changed:

Despite the fact that BIOS has GTX 480 card’s info, it ID has not changed. Somehow, integrated safety feature in our graphic cards allows us to change card’s ID form 06C4 (GTX 465) to 06CD (GTX 470) and vice versa, but every attempt to change card’s ID to 06C0 (GTX 480) failed to succeed.

Overclocking

Opportunity to flash our Point of View GTX 465 to get an elder model and backwards, gave us a chance to overclock both variants — let’s see how the original GTX 465 overclocks and how does the overclocking result change when the card is flashed to GTX 470.
First, we try to overclock PoV GTX 465 without voltage change. For that we use already known graphic card’s clock and voltage editing tools — MSI Afterburner and NVIDIA Inspector. Video card tests allow us to overclock GTX 465 to 780 MHz for GPU and to 725 MHz for GPU when the card was flashed to GTX 470 without any loss in stability.

Let’s see how overclocking affects the temperature regime:

Well, we’ve come to the final part of our review — performance test of our GTX 465 variants.