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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Assimilator87 - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Bad drivers are the reason I'm switching back to ATi next round. Six months to fix a very annoying F@H issue is not acceptable in my book.Zed03 - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Just keep in mind this review is from the same people that claimed GTX 560 ti is faster than 6950.All of these charts were selected to make the the GTX 560 448 look good.
On the Crysis, Battleforce, and Metro page, when the 6970 has a 30% lead, they call it a:
"With Metro 2033 we see AMD and NVIDIA swap positions again, this time leaving AMD’s lineup with the very slight edge."
On the remainder of the reviews, when the GTX 560 448 performs 5% faster in a certain configuration, the performance is "dominating".
Wait for a real benchmark.
Mstngs351 - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
You may want to drop your biased view of Anandtech and pay closer attention to the article."With Metro 2033 we see AMD and NVIDIA swap positions again, this time leaving AMD’s lineup with the very slight edge." You'll notice that it states "lineup" not 560ti 448.
You would also do well to notice that when it came to Metro 2033 the 580 was top dog at all resolutions so making the statement that AMD has a "slight edge" is, in my opinion generous.
DaveLessnau - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
This is purely a comment about the editing of the article. I don't know if it's a function of your word processing software or if it's something you did on purpose, but ordinal numbers like 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc., don't superscript the alpha part. Every time I ran across your superscripted ordinals, my eyes just locked onto the word and I lost track of the article flow. If at all possible, please fix that.DaveLessnau - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Oh, and I know that Word superscripts ordinals, too. But, it doesn't put the baseline of the superscript above the top line of the regular characters.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 - link
You're correct, I am using Word to write the text for these articles. Our CMS converts Word superscript to <sup> tags, which is why you're selling the final result since HTML4 says that superscript "appears half a character above the baseline". I do like having superscript, but you make a good point in that being above the baseline is annoying, so I'll go take a look at it.siberian3 - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Who cares for such a product so late in the game when weare waiting Radeon HD7xxx and NV GTX6xx cards in a few months?
Performance Fanboi - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
If they were going with something that clumsy they should have just gone with GTX560-ClearingSiliconinAdvanceofKepler-448Seriously though, GTO560 for a so-called limited card at the end of the product cycle would have fit better eg: 7900GTO when they were clearing out G70.
nevertell - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Have you tried unlocking the locked off cores ? This was the only incentive to buy a 465 back in the day. That's what I was hoping for anyway, when I first heard about nvidia releasing another GF100 based product.Leyawiin - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link
Its a very good card for a decent price if you can't wait for the next gen from both companies. Kind of amusing all the withering comments and hair-splitting over review game choices. Its a better card than the HD 6950. Period. Give it the due it deserves.