ASUS is expanding their triple-slot cooler graphics card lineup. Their GeForce GTX 570 Direct CU II offers amazingly low noise levels as well as low operating temperatures in both idle and 3D. ASUS has also increased to clock speeds out of the box, even though the increase is only minimal. But with a price increase of just $10 there is not much to complain about.
ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 560 Ti AMP! Edition is the highest-clocked GTX 560 money can buy at the moment. Its blazing clocks of 950 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory give it a 12% real-life performance advantage over the reference design, which is quite impressive for the $279 it's coming at. With additional overclocking we could reach 998 MHz, and almost broke the 1 GHz barrier!
MSI's HD 6870 HAWK is the company's premium overclocking HD 6870 model. The card comes with support for software control of three voltages, voltage measurement points and OCP disable support. MSI has also included a nice overclock out of the box and adopted the dual BIOS feature that we have seen on the AMD HD 6900 Series.
PowerColor is bringing an exciting new HD 6950 to the market. Their HD 6950 PCS++ includes a feature to unlock additional shaders, resulting in the same shader count as the HD 6970 - a nice performance increase, for free. Since the feature is enabled by the flick of a button even novices will be able to use it.
ASUS' new GeForce GTX 580 DC2 uses a massive triple slot Direct CU II heatsink that increases cooling performance significantly. As a result the card is extremely quiet in both idle and load - quieter than many midrange cards. ASUS has also increased the operating clocks of their design, all this for a small price increase of $5.
NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 440 sets out to deliver acceptable performance in the low-end segment around $100. ASUS GT 440 comes with a custom designed, black PCB and a stylish heatsink. The card also comes with higher clocks out of the box to gain an extra performance advantage.
Palit's GeForce GTX 560 Ti Sonic Edition comes with increased clock speeds of 900 MHz core and 1050 MHz memory out of the box, which translates into a 7% real-life performance improvement. Its $20 price premium also gives you improved display connectivity: full-size HDMI and analog VGA.
ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 560 uses reference clock speeds, but comes with a custom cooling solution by ZOTAC. The card is also one of the few that uses full-size HDMI and DisplayPort outputs and comes with a bundle of Assassin's Creed Hermand.
NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 560 Ti is priced at the sweet spot of $249. It comes with a redesigned graphics processor that enables higher clock speeds and lower power consumption. NVIDIA's reference design board excels with nice overclocking potential and low fan noise.
Today NVIDIA announced their new GeForce GTX 560 Ti Series. ASUS designed a custom PCB and cooling solution around the new graphics processor. The factory overclocking ASUS GTX 560 Ti Direct CU II sets out to deliver maximum cooling power for improved overclocking and reduced temperatures.
NVIDIA's new GTX 560 Ti delivers excellent price/performance in the $250 market segment. We take two of these cards for a spin to investigate whether it makes sense to buy two of them for use in SLI.
MSI's HD 6950 Twin Frozr II is the first custom design HD 6950 to reach our labs. It comes with a small overclock out of the box and MSI's well established Twin Frozr II heatsink to keep the card cool.
MSI's HD 6850 Cyclone Power Edition comes at 860 MHz, which is the largest overclock out of the box of any HD 6850 available. The card also features a little switch to enable a silent BIOS which reduces fan noise considerably and makes the card a virtually noiseless experience to use, in both idle and 3D.
ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 580 AMP! Edition comes at a massive core clock of 815 MHz. During our testing we also noticed that the card could overclock consistently higher than other reference designs, which seems to be thanks to a special binning process in the ZOTAC factory.
In this article we will investigate how much the HD 4870, HD 5870, GTX 285 and GTX 480 have gained over the lifetime of their driver releases. We also put this in contrast to what the latest AMD Catalyst 10.12 driver update can deliver.
In this review we will look at the performance of two Radeon HD 6950 cards running in CrossFire. This delivers a massively powerful graphics solution that is over 25% faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 and also beats AMD HD 5970. At $600, this setup also manages to deliver maximum price/performance when looked at from a high-end graphics angle.
AMD's new Radeon HD 6970 comes with an improved shader architecture that promises more performance with less transistors, consuming less power. Another interesting aspect is the inclusion of a power limitation system that ensures maximum performance when needed and avoids damage to the graphics cards.
HIS Radeon HD 6950 is a new option in the $300 upper midrange graphics card segment. It has enough power to play the latest titles in Full HD resolution. Thanks to improved geometry and tesselation engines it also promises to deliver increased performance in latest titles compared to the Radeon HD 5870.
Today NVIDIA launches their new GeForce GTX 570 graphics card which is based on the new more power efficient Fermi technology that we saw on the GTX 580, too. ASUS' GTX 570 is a full reference design implementation, the only difference is a small clock speed increase of 10 MHz.
NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 570 complements the GTX 580 at more affordable price levels. It offers the same reduced power consumption as its big brother without compromising performance. Palit's GTX 570 is a custom design with a unique thermal solution and substantially increased clock speeds out of the box.
PowerColor's HD 6870 PCS+ comes with some of the highest out of the box clock speeds of all HD 6870 cards available today. It also comes with a unique thermal solution that offers extremely low noise levels in both idle and load. Another improvement is that power consumption is slightly lower than AMD's reference design - despite the higher clock speed.
Last week NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 460 SE which is designed to give a good price/performance level without compromising on memory amount. But is this enough to compete with the full GTX 460 variants that have 768 MB or 1 GB of memory?
Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 480 Super Overclock sets out to deliver affordable high-end overclocking for NVIDIA users. The card features dual voltage software control, voltage measurement points, a powerful but quiet triple fan cooler and Gigabyte's OC Guru overclocking software. Best of all, it comes at a reasonable $469 which is not much more than the reference design. But is that enough to hold off the GeForce GTX 580 ?
Last week NVIDIA released their new flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. Today we have on our testbench the ASUS ENGTX580 which is an almost full implementation of the reference design. The only exception is that the clock speed has been slightly increased - at no price premium.
Today NVIDIA releases their new GeForce GTX 580 which is based on their Fermi architecture. The card is 20% faster than the GTX 480, yet requires less power. NVIDIA has also optimized fan noise making this the quietest highest-end card on the market today.
