nVidia GTX560 Ti Review

Conclusion

The low to mid-range cards are always a tough thing to sum up. On the one hand you have the attractive pricing which means that we have to take into account lower performance, but the methods in which the cards are cut-down to reach that price-point vary so much that it isn’t always easy to decide if the losses are worth the price or if you’re giving up too much to be affordable.

Thankfully the GTX560 Ti gives us no such problems.

At stock it’s a good performer throughout all of our testing. Considering we run at 1920×1200 and normally with very high anti-aliasing levels the GTX560 Ti still proves playable, but with a slight resolution drop if you’re on a 22″ monitor, or an acceptance for 4x AA rather than the 8x we test at you’ll easily be banging out very smooth performance indeed.

Overclocking though. Overclocking turns the GTX560 Ti into quite a different beast altogether. If it wasn’t impressive enough at stock, and it is, then the performance once it’s overclocked is in another league. It’s not only on a par with its big brother in some tests, but often ahead of the AMD HD6970. The thing that took us completely by surprise is how easily it could be pushed far beyond what we would expect it to be stable at, but without becoming a toaster or deafening your neighbours.

This perhaps needs emphasising, because it really is the definitive example of both how quickly nVidia have turned things around, and how quickly AMD have lost their way. The HD6970 is currently the top of the range AMD card. This GTX560 Ti is the current bottom of the GTX 5 series from nVidia. Price-wise there is a hundred quid between the two, but performance wise they’re pretty inseparable in the tests that matter.

There is no question that if you are in the market for a new graphics card, be it an ultra high-end GTX580, a more sensibly priced GTX570, or the stunning value GTX560 Ti we have on test here, that nVidia are the recommended choice in all three brackets now. They deserve huge kudos for not pretending the GTX480 was anything other than what it was and returning to their R&D department with renewed vigour.

We especially need to point out the concave shroud design and how it easily solves the problem of airflow in a dual-card system. We’re sure this will be adopted by all the cards soon.

The GTX560 Ti is damn good just at stock, when overclocked it’s mind-blowing. Not only is it worthy of the OC3D Gold award, but also our Performance Award for its overclocking abilities. The nVidia GTX560 Ti completes nVidia’s domination of the graphics card market.

        

Thanks to nVidia for supplying the GTX560 Ti for review. Discuss in our forums.