In a segment where we know a surprise awaits us with every new release, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti lived up to being a bundle of surprises. To begin with, it can bulldoze through any game at any resolution, making DirectX 11 games playable even at the highest resolution. While asking for a higher price than what the GTX 460 1 GB did on its launch, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti lived up to it by giving us excellent price-performance ratio, which surpasses both the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6950, two SKUs in proximity.

ASUS' GeForce GTX 560 Ti Direct CU II comes with the company's latest and greatest cooling solution Direct CU II. It delivers low temperatures, but the fan control table does not seem to be optimized for noise reduction. In idle, the card becomes quite noisy - more than other cards in this performance segment and more than NVIDIA's reference design.
The overclock out of the box is solid and helps the card gain about 7% over the NVIDIA reference board.
The GTX 560 Ti has some problem areas lurking in the wild. First, rival AMD announced some radical price cuts on its Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6950. They're not in effect yet, so they missed the bus when I was finalizing the performance-price. It's not like you're going to wake up tomorrow to find those prices. So while not an immediate threat, Radeon HD 6800/6900 SKUs might become compelling in the days to come. Further, there's the diminishing prospect of getting lucky in modding the HD 6950 to HD 6970. NVIDIA didn't really innovate anything with this product. OK, it's gotten itself pretty comfortable with the $250 price point, but come on..I want the 3-way SLI support back for this segment. $150 GTS 250 cards had them, HD 6950 has 4-way CrossFireX support. There's nothing new with the feature-set either. NVIDIA should have given a little something more for people already using a lower-performing DirectX 11 GPU to upgrade.