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| Introduction and Specifications | ||||
| Just in time for the holiday buying season, NVIDIA is at the ready with a brand new graphics card. Sort of. Today, NVIDIA is announcing the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores. Some of you may be thinking, “Hey! GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards use the GF114 GPU which offers a maximum of 384 cores!” And you’d be right. This new GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores, however, isn’t built around the GF114 GPU. Rather, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores is outfitted with the same GF110 GPU powering the high-end GeForce GTX 570 and GTX 580, but with a couple of its SMs fused off. There are some other factors that differentiate the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores from other GF110-based cards as well, but NVIDIA had a bin of the GPUs with 448 cores available and decided to put together a graphics card that would fill the gap between existing GeForce GTX 560 Ti and GeForce GTX 570. Instead of naming the card something like the GeForce GTX 565, however, NVIDIA chose the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores moniker because the card will be a limited edition. Once the bin of 448-core GF110 GPUs is gone, so will the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores. NVIDIA is also only offering this card in certain key regions—it won’t be a worldwide release.
The GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores has—you guessed it—448 CUDA cores arranged in 14 SMs, with 56 texture units and 40 ROPs. The reference specifications call for a 732MHz core clock with 1464MHz CUDA cores. 1.2GB of GDDR5 memory is linked to the GPU via a 320-bit bus and the memory is clocked at an effective 3800MHz data rate. The cards will require a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power leads and support up to 3-way SLI.
The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition strays from NVIDIA’s reference design in that is sports a custom, single-fan cooler and overclocked GPU. The GPU clock is increased to 765MHz with 1530MHz CUDA cores, but the memory clock remains unchanged from the 3800MHz (effective data rate) of the reference design. As you can see in the pictures above, the card is two-slots wide and features dual DVI outputs along with one HDMI output and one DisplayPort output.
Zotac includes a nice accessory bundle with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition as well. Along with the card itself, we found a user’s manual, quick installation guide, a Zotac case badge, two peripheral-to-6-pin power adapters, a VGA-to-DVI adapter, and a driver / utility disc that includes copies of vReveal, Nero Vision Xtra, CoolIris, XBMC, and Kylo. Although not pictured here, we’re told that Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition cards sold in the U.S. will also include a coupon code for a copy of Battlefield 3. Now that’s one heck of a game to bundle. |
| Test Setup & Unigine Heaven | ||||||||||||
How We Configured Our Test Systems: We tested the graphics cards in this article on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7 980X six-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings (DDR3-1333, CAS 7) and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest DirectX redist, along with the necessary drivers, games, and benchmark applications.
The new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card falls into place right where you'd expect it to in the Unigine Heaven benchmark, which is to say it was somewhat faster than the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but a hair slower than the higher-end GeForce GTX 570. |
| FarCry 2 Performance | ||||||
FarCry 2 tells essentially the same story as Unigine Heaven on the previous page. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card come in just ahead of the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but a bit behind the GeForce GTX 570. The higher GPU clock of the Zotac card also gives it a slight edge over the reference clocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core GPU. |
| Just Cause 2 Performance | ||||||
At this point, it should come as no surprise that a specific trend is emerging. Once again, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition cards offered higher framerates than the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but just missed the mark set by the GeForce GTX 570. |
| Metro 2033 Performance | ||||||
The same performance trend we've seen throughout all of our tests thus far played out again in Metro 2033. This time around, though, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition's performance was closer to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti than it was to the higher-end GeForce GTX 570. |
| Lost Planet 2 Performance | ||||||
The performance trend continued in our Lost Planet 2 tests, but in this benchmark the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition offered performance well ahead of the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and only slightly trailed the GeForce GTX 570. |
| F1 2010 Performance | ||||||
The performance trend in the F1 2010 benchmark looked much like the one from LP2 on the previous page. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition was once again faster than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and a touch slower than the GeForce GTX 570. But the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card's performance was much closer to the higher-end 570 than it was to the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti. |
| Alien vs. Predator Performance | ||||||
Our final benchmark doesn't reveal anything new. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card finishes ahead of the original GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but behind the GeForce GTX 570. |
| Total System Power Consumption | ||||
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption, noise, and overclocking. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
As its framerates have suggested throughout our testing, the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card's power consumptions characteristics are in-line with is performance. While idling, the card consumed only slightly more power than the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and slightly less than the GTX 570. The same is true for its power consumption while under load, but it was closer to the GeForce GTX 570 than the lower-end Ti card. |
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GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition cards will be available immediately from a number of NVIDIA’s key AIB partners, like Zotac, EVGA, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Gainward, Inno3D and Palit, in the US and Canada and across the pond in the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and Nordics, but it will not be a worldwide release. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core will be a limited edition product that’s not intended for every market and will likely sell out within a couple of months according to NVIDIA.
