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. So you shouldn't mind paying $250 for this card. Despite having significantly higher clock speeds and all its transistors enabled, the GTX 560 Ti has decent power consumption numbers, which makes performance-per-watt figures shine.

If 800+ MHz core clock wasn't spectacularly high enough for Fermi architecture's standards, the GTX 560 Ti lets you overclock close to the 1 GHz mark. Certain board partners even have plans to sell GTX 560 Ti custom design cards with 1 GHz out of the box. The reference board looks much more polished, and has the high-end product design finesse that we thought was lacking in the mainstream-looking GTX 460. Its cooler is doing a decent job while staying quiet. Noise-swings aren't sharp, it won't distract you when you're gaming on speakers.

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.

Overall, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti has emerged a champion for this segment. It's striking the price performance sweet-spot well, giving you performance to play anything at any resolution, and is both cool and quiet. Highly recommended.