- Dirt 2 (DirectX 11)

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. The game runs on an updated version of the EGO engine, which powered Codemasters' Race Driver: Grid as well. The engine features an updated physics engine and runs on DirectX 11. We installed the the game patch and measured the in-game performance of the Gainward GTX 465 GOOD graphics card at 1920x1200 and with the AA enabled:

The Gainward GTX 465 GOOD actually performed better than the GTX 470 series at the " low" and "Medium" quality levels. It also stayed very close to the performance of the GTX 470 as we pushed the quality of the visuals.

- Alien vs Predator Benchmark v1.03 (DirectX 11)

Rebellion has released a standalone DirectX 11 PC benchmark test based upon its shooter Aliens vs. Predator. The benchmark test requires a graphics support supporting DirectX 11, which are used to produce such fancy features as tessellation, advanced shadow sampling and DX11 anti-aliasing.

We used the default settings of the benchmark (resolution: 1920 x 1200, Texture Quality: 2, Shadow Quality: 3, Anisotropic Filtering: 16, SSAO: ON, Vertical Sync: OFF, DX11 Tessellation: ON, DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON, DX11 MSAA Samples: 1). The Gainward GTX 465 GOOD edition gave an average FPS of ~28.8, which is acceptable for such a demanding game and resolution.

- Overclocking

In order to overclock the Fermi-based GTX 465 GPU, we downloaded the MSI AfterBurner 1.60 beta 6 utility, which also unlocks the card's voltages allowing further tweaking. We enabled the 'Core Voltage' slider (though the 'settings' tab). The Core Voltage slider can go up to 1.087V to further increase the overclocking margins. The 'Core' and 'Shader' sliders are synched and move as one, allowing you to play with the 'Memory' slider as well. The package also includes the 'MSI Kombustor' application that stresses your graphics card and test its stability.

First we moved slider up to the 824MHz / 1648MHz / 1000MHz (core/shader/memory) and we tested the stability with both MSI Kombustor application and games, with the fan speed set to 'Auto.'

While the system looked stable for a long period it failed after 30mins of heavy load, so this attempt was not succesfull Remember that we haven't mess up with the core voltage yet.

We lowered the speeds a bit and we had a perfectly stable system at 800 MHz / 1600 MHz /975 MHz (core/shader/memory), confirmed using the MSI Kombuster application and the ' Far Cry 2' game:

We kept experimenting a little bit more with the core voltage and the core/shader/memory settings. We increased the 'core voltage' up to the 1.087V (max) and manually set manually the card's fans to spin at 100% RPM. However, the system was not stable, so it is advised to play around the 800+ MHz for the core and the 975+ MHz for the memory:

Such an overclocking resulted to a significant higher score with the 3D Mark Vantage. In addition, the 'Far Cry 2' game gave us 11 extra FPS at 1920x1200 with 8xAA and 'Ultra quality', which is an impressive gain.