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.



ZOTAC's new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core graphics card is based on their current GTX 570, which uses the company's distinctive cooler. We tested three GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores cards today - ZOTAC's card offers the highest clock speed out of the box: 765 MHz, which should give the card a healthy performance boost in our benchmarks. Price-wise the card is also the cheapest, coming at the NVIDIA MSRP of $289, whereas other cards tested today are $299.



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

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• 2x PCIe Power Adapter
• Analog VGA Adapter

The Card

Out of all the cards tested today, the ZOTAC GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores is the most compact card. Its size actually feels closer to a "normal" GTX 560 Ti, than the GTX 570, which it is based on.


The card requires two 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.


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