NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti w/448 Cores: GTX 570 On A Budget
by Ryan Smith on November 29, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMeet The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Edition
There will be a number of GTX 560-448 cards launching today; most of NVIDIA’s partners will be involved, including Asus, EVGA, Gainward, Gigabyte, Inno3D, Palit, MSI and Zotac. Given that these will be custom designs no two cards will be alike, and while performance should be similar (accounting for clock differences), thermals and noise are going to vary with the design.
The card we’ve been sampled with is Zotac’s entry, the Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Edition. Zotac’s design is based on their existing GTX 570 design, which is an open-air cooler with copper heatpipes running up from the GPU to the heatsink. It’s effectively a bigger, more capable version of the GTX 560 Ti reference cooler, which means it shares the temperature and noise benefits of that design at a cost of dumping most of the heat produced inside your computer case.
While this isn’t an AMP product – AMP being Zotac’s factory overclock brand – Zotac is still goosing their GTX 560-448 by a bit. It will ship at 765MHz core instead of 732MHz (a 4% boost), while memory speeds are unchanged. It’s a bigger factory overclock than we’ve seen in some other cards, but 4% won’t make a huge difference in performance most of the time.
Breaking down the card it’s quite similar to other single-fan open-air coolers we’ve seen such as the reference GTX 560 Ti. Airflow is provided by a center fan with heatsinks covering the most important bits. The 2 6pin PCIe power sockets are placed at the rear of the card, which is not ideal but not a huge problem as the card is not particularly long.
For display connectivity Zotac is once again using their expanded offering. Along with the 2 DVI ports common on high-end NVIDIA cards, Zotac is also offering a full size HDMI port, and rare for an NVIDIA based card, a full size DisplayPort. Zotac achieves this by moving one of the DVI ports to the 2nd slot on the card’s bracket, which is a convenient location but further restricts the amount of air the card can eject outside of a computer case.
Along with the card, Zotac is continuing their tradition of bundling a game with their high-end cards. This time Zotac's North Amerian office is partnering with Electronic Arts, and they will be including a voucher for Battlefield 3 with their GTX 560-448 in North America. We’ve always been big fans of video cards including good games, so we’re glad to see Zotac continuing this tradition.
Rounding out the rest of the package is the typical collection of odds & ends: PCIe power adaptors, a multi-lingual quickstart guide, Zotac’s collection of OEM trialware, and a DVI to VGA dongle.
Between the overclock and the inclusion of Battlefield 3, it should come as no surprise that Zotac is charging above NVIDIA’s MSRP for the card. Zotac will be charging $299, $10 over MSRP – the overclock isn’t particularly impressive, but if you're in a territory that gets BF3, $10 for BF3 is a good deal any day of the week.
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Jamahl - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
In your 560 Ti review you said that it was "a bit faster" than the 6950. What's changed? Maybe AMD's drivers are helping to pull the card away because it's clearly ahead here with the same games being tested.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4135/nvidias-geforce...
"The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has the edge: it’s a bit faster and it’s quieter than the 6950"
Perhaps you should do an article on that one? You know you were one of the very few sites on the web who actually found the 560 Ti to be faster than the 6950 in the first place?
I wonder why that was.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
If you haven't already, I'd invite you to take a look at Bench, our online benchmark database. The video card numbers are periodically revised for newer articles, which is what you're seeing here.The latest data we have for the 6950 vs. the GTX 560 Ti: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/293?vs=330
Jamahl - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Glad to see you are keeping those updated and thanks for the reply.My point was, what happened to the 560 Ti's lead from your initial review? Looking at that bench now the 6950 is a good bit ahead.
Drivers?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Yes, I'd say that's a fair assessment. Looking at 1920 between January and NovemberCrysis: 48.6->51.4
BF: 58.3->68.9
HAWX: 108->119
CivV: 34.8->40.1
BC2: 61.8->69.2
Etc.
Note that the 560 Ti was launched only a month after the 6900 series, so AMD only had a short amount of time to optimize their 6900 drivers between the 6900 launch and then. Whereas they've had another 10 months since then to work on their drivers further. Given the similarities between VLIW4 and VLIW5, if you had asked me for my expectations 10 months ago it's actually more than I thought AMD would get out of optimizations.
Meanwhile the 560 Ti has shifted very little in comparison, which is not surprising since the Fermi-lite architecture had been around for over half a year by that point.
The 560 Ti and 6950 still trade blows depending on the game in a very obvious way, but the 6950 is now winning more games and on a pure numerical average is clearly doing better.
Jamahl - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Yep that looks like a pretty fair assessment. I was suprised to see the gap open up so clearly.pixelstuff - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Are these all of the crappy GF110 processors that had manufacturing defects?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Correct. Technically speaking NVIDIA could take perfectly good GF110 GPUs can still make products like this, but it wouldn't make any sense for them to do so. All of these cards would be using GF110 GPUs with 2 defective SMs.Duwelon - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Your image shows 3 defective SMs. At least i'm assuming it's supposed to be the "new" chip.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
Indeed, that was a diagram error on my part. It's been fixed.piroroadkill - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
I'd still regard the 6950 2GB as the best value proposition card, and it has been ever since the launch of the card almost a year ago.Even though I only bought one recently, and heard the extra shaders had been lasered off, this thankfully proved wrong, and one BIOS update later and I have a 6970.
You can't ignore value like that.