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.
Palit's GeForce GTX 560 Ti Sonic Edition comes with high clock speeds of 900 MHz / 1050 MHz out of the box which results in a real-life performance improvement of about 7%. Like all other non-reference design GTX 560 cards that we tested today, the card is noisier under load than NVIDIA's reference design. It is interesting to see Palit go the route of 2x DVI, 1x analog and 1x full size HDMI output instead of the mini-HDMI and/or DisplayPort configurations that other board partners use. This is certainly because Palit is still seeing significant demand for analog VGA output cards - and full size HDMI is just so convenient when hooking up the PC to the TV screen.
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 450 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. Highly recommended.