Introduction

With the all-important winter shopping season around the corner, NVIDIA wants to fortify its "Sweet Spot" segment. This segment consists of graphics cards with good price-performance ratios, that gamers making far-sighted buying decisions end up choosing. Presenting the all-new GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 CUDA cores. GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores will not be available worldwide, according to NVIDIA the regions are USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Russia and the Nordics.

The current GeForce GTX 560 Ti has achieved a good price-performance equation with prices well under US $250 and improvements in performance thanks to mature drivers; but a vacuum has been created between it and the GeForce GTX 570, that is about $100 costlier, and classifies as high-end. NVIDIA maxed out the number of CUDA cores that can be activated on the GF114 silicon (384), adding more memory won't help it much, and will instead drive up power draw because the memory bus width is maxed out as well. The only option left is carving out a new SKU using the GF110 silicon.



ASUS is among the first with an all-new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core graphics card. The company builds on the success of their triple slot DirectCU II cooler, which promises lower temperatures, less noise and better overclocking potential. In terms of clock speeds the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores DirectCU II is the only card we tested today that comes at the NVIDIA reference clock speeds of 732 MHz.



The GF110 graphics processor has 512 CUDA cores, the GeForce GTX 580 has all those cores, 1536 MB of memory, and the full 384-bit GDDR5 memory bus enabled. The GeForce GTX 570 has 480 CUDA cores enabled, 1280 MB of memory, and the memory bus width is lowered to 320-bit. Without tinkering with the memory bus or clock speeds, NVIDIA carved out the new GTX 560 Ti by setting an active CUDA core count of 448.

The new GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 CUDA cores essentially has the same core configuration as the previous-generation GeForce GTX 470, except that it's based on a new silicon that's far superior in terms of energy-efficiency and thermal characteristics, and that it has higher clock speeds.

Packaging & Contents

We received a card only from ASUS, without the packaging.

Since this card is based on their GeForce GTX 570 DirectCU II I would expect a similar accessory package with the usual cables and adapters.

The Card

The ASUS GTX 560 Ti 448 DirectCU II cooler is huge and covers all of the card's surface area with its two large fan blades.


The card requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort. Due to NVIDIA's architecture you may only use two outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies.


You may combine up to four GTX 560 Ti 448 Core cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU SLI configuration for higher framerates or better image quality settings. This card can not be combined with the "normal" GTX 560 Ti as it uses a different GPU design. SLI with GTX 570 or 580 is also not possible.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.

A Closer Look

We have seen the ASUS DirectCU II heatsink on several cards, both from NVIDIA and AMD. Thanks to its triple slot design, the cooler provides excellent cooling capabilities with its five heatpipes.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power cables connected. This power configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.


The voltage controller has been rebranded to use ASUS' SHE markings. Based on the package design it looks like a product from uPI with the paint scraped off and SHE printed on it.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FG-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA uses their GF110 graphics processor on the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores. This is the same GPU that's used on the GTX 580 and GTX 570, just in a configuration with reduced shader count. The GPU is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF100 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption.