Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Review

Performance Analysis

We’ve seen plenty of GTX 560 Ti 1GB cards over the past few months and knew to expect great performance at reasonably high resolutions such as 1,920 x 1,080. We weren’t let down by the Gainward, as it returned an excellent set of numbers at stock speed. Dirt 2 never dipped below 57fps even at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA while the card managed a minimum of almost 70fps in Black Ops at the same settings.

Even Arma II and Bad Company 2 weren’t enough to humble the Gainward, with playable minimum frame rates from the card in both games at 1,920 x 1,080 with 4x AA. The minimum of 37fps in Arma II is a fine result, as is the 38fps minimum in Bad Company 2.

The Gainward was very quiet when idle, but the fans were audible when the card was working hard – the sound was a low-pitched whoosh, though, and easy to ignore. The Gainward was equally well-behaved when it came to power consumption, with only a slight increase over a stock-speed card due to the factory overclock. The cooler worked well when idle with a low GPU delta T of 10˚C; this rose to 51˚C under load, which is on the warm side but not worryingly so.

Overclocking

We downloaded Gainward’s XperTool overclocking software to see if we could run all of our games smoothly at 2,560 x 1,600. We hit an issue when tinkering with this, however, as the Gainward is the first GTX 560 Ti 1GB we’ve tested not to hit a GPU core frequency of 950MHz. So we had to settle for a measly 15MHz overclock, as anything beyond this caused artefacting.

We had far more joy with the memory, as we quickly pushed it to XperTool’s maximum allowable ‘2410’ level, which resulted in an overclock of 620MHz (effective) and an effective memory frequency of 4.82GHz. Not satisfied with this, we loaded MSI’s excellent AfterBurner tool and pushed the memory all the way to an effective frequency of 5GHz.

Despite the weedy GPU overclock, we could now play Bad Company 2 at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA on the Gainward, thanks to a minimum frame rate of 26fps. Arma II stubbornly refused to run with any grace, however, with a stuttery 24fps minimum.

Conclusion

As befits the best mid-range GPU of its generation, we’ve seen loads of graphics card based around Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB GPU. This is a bad thing for Gainward, however, as we’ve seen some truly great cards that are now available for some really competitive prices.

Take the awesome MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC, which boasts a similar overclock and great cooler and proved to be very overclockable. This fantastic card now costs only £184, meaning that you can buy both the card and a game for the same price as this slightly inferior Gainward card. For once, the marketing department of a company has got it right: this card is good, but there are great alternatives.