The Galaxy GeForce GTX 560 Ti GC

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU was released to the world earlier this week and we have a handful of retail options in the lab to poke with the testing stick and see what turns up. With a card from Galaxy, MSI and Palit, we see how much performance gain you’ll see with their stock overclocks as well as how high we can push the GPU with the improved coolers.
Introduction

Earlier in the week we saw the release of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU – the new offering competes with the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6950 1GB from AMD and in general falls right between them.  You should definitely check out our first review of the GTX 560 Ti as it will give you an overview of the GPU technology and how it fits into the market with the AMD offerings as well as NVIDIA’s own GeForce GTX 460. 

The new GTX 560 Ti is based on the GF114 GPU and is essentially the same core as the GF104 when looked at under that magical “diagram” microscope. 

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 83

This should look very familiar to you if you have read our GTX 460 review linked above.  While the GTX 460 had only 336 CUDA cores with one of the SMs (simultaneous multiprocessors), the new GTX 560 Ti uses all 8 of them for a total of 384 total CUDA cores.  The process continues to be tweaked and as a result the GTX 560 Ti offers efficiency improvements as well as performance gains over the GTX 460.

Today we are looking at set of three of the retail cards: one from Galaxy, MSI and Palit.  For those that want the 4-minute video overview of these cards, check out the clip below, and for those that want ALL of the details, images, tests, continue on down the page!



The Galaxy GTX 560 Ti GC – Unique Cooler Design

Galaxy, as evident by its recent Razor and WHDI releases on the GTX 460 design, continues to be one of the few very innovative partners of NVIDIA.  We don’t have anything THAT unique here today if only because the card is so new. 

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 84

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 85

The cooler design is much improved over the older GTX 460/470 designs with the cheap plastic “space marine” look.  The GC version here from Galaxy is just barely overclocked: 835 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory speeds.

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 86

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 87

The GTX 560 Ti continues to only support 2-Way SLI – a bit of a letdown for us but more than adequate for the majority of PC gamers today.

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 88

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 89

The output connectivity follows the reference design with a mini-HDMI port and a pair of dual-link DVI outputs. 

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 90

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 91

Galaxy continues improving on the “removable fan” design, this time you need to remove a small screw at the top of each fan that allows you to simply swing it open for easy cleaning of the fan and heatsink.

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 92

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 93

With both fans open the user will have nearly complete access to the heatsink without having to do a lot of work – nice for anyone who knows the complexity of cleaning out the inside of your PC>

GeForce GTX 560 Ti Review Roundup - Galaxy, MSI and Palit Compared - Graphics Cards 94

The only thing that I didn’t like about this design is that you have to be VERY CAREFUL when folding the fans back in as the first time we did it the power cables to the fan were caught between the heatsink fins and the fan bracket which then interfered with the fan blades movement.  Just make sure you push the cable back with your finger as you fold the fan back. 



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