Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Review

Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Review

Manufacturer Gainward
UK price (as reviewed) £209.47 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed) Unknown

There are certain British stereotypes that are absolutely true – we’re a nation of tea drinkers, for example. If you falsely believe coffee to be superior, just ask yourself when you last used a coffeespoon. We’re rapidly shedding the self-assured confidence that Roger Moore typified when playing Bond, however – nowadays our footballers are a bunch of overpaid bottlers, while fist-pumping and whooping seems to have caught on elsewhere.

Gainward’s latest technology innovation is a reminder of our stiff upper lip heritage; this GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB card sports the confident yet understated GOOD technology. We’ve seen Gainward Optimised Own Design (GOOD, geddit) cards before, and liked them. This card’s GTX 570 1.3GB predecessor was a particular highlight; it was smaller and quieter than a typical GeForce GTX 460 1GB, while still being fast and overclockable.


This GTX 560 Ti 1GB card looks similar; its short 190mm long PCB and pair of side-mounted 6-pin PCI-E power connections make it suitable for a small gaming PC, while the chunky cooler uses a heavy heatsink and two 92mm fans.

However, while previous GOOD cards have included large plates to cool the memory and clamp the GPU heatsink tightly to the card, this card uses a more conventional cooler design. The large heatsink, with its pair of long 6mm-thick heatpipes and attendant fans and shroud, merely screws to the PCB via four screws positioned around the GPU.

Underneath is a 5-phase power circuit that uses fairly standard solid chokes and small digital MOSFETs – neither these VRMs nor the 1GB of GDDR5 memory has any extra cooling. This power circuitry has helped Gainward to overclock the GPU from the usual 820MHz to 900MHz, meaning that the 384 stream processors operate at 1.8GHz.


The memory has also seen a tweak, as it runs at 4.2GHz effective rather than just 4GHz effective. This gives the Gainward 134GB/sec of memory bandwidth rather than the usual 128GB/sec, which should be enough for an extra couple of frames per second if you’re running games at a high resolution or with 4x AA.

Specifications

• Graphics processor Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti, 900MHz
  
• Pipeline 384 stream processors (1,800MHz), 32 ROPs
  
• Memory 1GB GDDR5, 4,2GHz effective
  
• Bandwidth 134GB/sec, 256-bit interface
  
• Compatibility DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1
  
• Outputs/Inputs DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, 1x SLI
  
• Power connections 2x 6-pin PCI-E, end-mounted
  
• Size 190mm long, dual-slot
  
• Warranty Two years