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.

ZOTAC's version of the card is basically the NVIDIA reference design with a ZOTAC heatsink slapped on top. It seems to me that ZOTAC's heatsink can just handle the heat load from the card. The fan is quite noisy under load, and temperatures are already in the upper 70°s so there isn't too much headroom left for some manual optimization that trades fan noise for temperature.
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.