Final thoughts and rating
NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB graphics card, priced at a sniff below £200, represents a solid investment for today and tomorrow. High on performance and good in every other respect, most add-in card (AIC) partners will roll with the reference design in their line-ups. Some of the more adventurous partners will also have custom-designed cards that boost the already-high frequencies.
Better known as a purveyor of motherboards, Gigabyte has made a concerted attempt to outdo card-only manufacturers for both the AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. Armed with its top-line SOC range the company has done well in 2010, and it's no surprise to see the GeForce GTX 560 Ti receive the same treatment.
Shipping with a 1,000MHz core and 4,580MHz frequencies out of the box, up from the default 822MHz and 4008MHz, the Ti 560 SO's numbers are analogous to a GeForce GTX 570's, bringing genuinely high-end gaming to the fore. However, cranking up the clocks means that Gigabyte's GTX 560 Ti SO card pulls significantly greater juice than either the vanilla card or, even, the GTX 570 - there's literally a price to pay for outlandish performance from the GF114 die.
Ultimately, we applaud Gigabyte for really pushing the GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU to the limits, made possible by the use of a custom PCB and dual-fan cooler. Priced at around £225 we can recommend it to folk who can't quite stretch to either a GeForce GTX 570 or Radeon HD 6970 and require a genuinely viable option to the presently-available Radeon HD 6950 2GB.
The Good
Super-high clocks for a GTX 560 Ti
Palatable price premium over regular card
GTX 570-like performance
The Bad
Chews through a lot of watts when running at full tilt
Cooler is noisier than the reference card's
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS Awards
HEXUS Where2Buy
The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti SO card can be purchased at Scan and eBuyer here and here, respectively.
