ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 560 Ti AMP! Edition is the highest clocked GeForce GTX 560 card that you can buy at the moment. It offers substantially increased clock speeds of 950 MHz vs. 823 MHz on the reference design. This gives the card a nice performance boost of around 12% at a resolution of 1920x1200 averaged over all our benchmarks. 12% is something that you would certainly notice in gaming. It that is not enough for you, you can still overclock the card some more, we reached 998 MHz which is an outstanding result for a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Other cards from other vendors barely reach 940 MHz.
One reason the ZOTAC AMP! Edition performs so well is the increased GPU voltage of 1.17 V which results in quite a power consumption increase. Together with the higher clocks and the increased operating temperature the GTX 560 AMP! turns into a power sucking beast. In a typical 3D application it consumes 184 W - the reference design needs only 128 W. The higher power draw leads to increased temperatures which the cooler can just handle.
As a result of the high power consumption and temperatures the fan has to run quite fast to keep the card cool, resulting in a fairly noisy experience when the card is loaded with gaming. In idle the fan noise is roughly the same as the GTX 560 reference design which is a good thing.
Overall ZOTAC's AMP! Edition is an attractive card if noise is only of secondary concern and you want to maximize performance. Its price of $279 is reasonable considering the performance it offers, the included full version of Assassin's Creed Brotherhood helps offset the cost.