NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core Review Round-Up

Tis the season for PC innards, and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core is just the limited-edition graphics card you may have been looking for, what with its vast similarities to the existing GTX 560 Ti already on the market and its cut-back GF110 in its guts. The GPU you've got here, the GF110, was originally used in the GeForce 580, then again in the GTX 570, and now here in the GTX 560 Ti 448 Core, it being cut back each time to accommodate the lower powered systems. You've also got 56 texture units, 40 ROPs, 448 shader cores, and a 320-bit memory interface. Know what all that means? You're in the right place!

What we're doing here is going down the list of trusted reviewers who today have their hands on the new core in a couple different brand flavors. Note here that each photo or benchmark sits below the author who photographed and/or provided it, except the image above which is also coming from HotHardware. The first of these is Don Woligroski of Tom's Hardware who has the Zotac brand 448 Core, and his description of it lets us know how cool this card can be:

" Zotac's option is based on its GeForce GTX 570 AMP! Edition card. As expected, then, it's 9.5" long (about an inch less than the reference GeForce GTX 570 and about half an inch longer than the reference GeForce GTX 560 Ti). The 448-core card doesn't get the designation of being one of Zotac's AMP! models, but it does feature a slight increase of 33 MHz over the reference 732 MHz core clock spec. ... The card has an interesting choice of outputs: two dual-link DVI ports, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort connector. You generally don't see four total outputs on a GeForce-based card, since Nvidia's GPUs still max out with two independent display pipelines. However, the choice to pick any two of the four is still nice."

Next we have Marco Chiappetta of HotHardWare who is using the same Zotac version of the core inside a Intel Core i7 980X (3.3GHz, Six-Core) and Gigabyte EX58-UD5 (Intel X58 Express), the first of the benchmarks being spoken about in just such a way:

"Unigine's Heaven Benchmark v2.5 is built around the Unigine game engine. Unigine is a cross-platform, real-time 3D engine, with support for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11 and OpenGL. The Heaven benchmark–when run in DX11 mode–also makes comprehensive use of tessellation technology and advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) It also features volumetric cumulonimbus clouds generated by a physically accurate algorithm and a dynamic sky with light scattering. ... 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." – Chiappetta

From Benchmark Reviews there's Hank Tolman who is one of the rare reviewers to get the EVEA version of the card, noting from what we can tell that there's not just a WHOLE lot of difference between this is the others. He also does benchmarks with a series of games, here with Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

"I really can't complain at all about the performance of the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW. NVIDIA says that the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores should run about 5% slower than the GTX 570, thus filling the gap between the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 570. This is almost exactly the case in the tests I have run with the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW. I think there was only one test where the difference was 6% or more. The rest were either 5% or below. That's likely due to the fact that the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW outclocks the stock GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores. With performance that close, it is probably a good bet that, when overclocked, the EVGA GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW will do very well. ... In our benchmark tests of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the first three minutes of action in the single-player raft night scene are captured with FRAPS. Relative to the online multiplayer action, these frame rate results are nearly identical to daytime maps with the same video settings." – Tolman

Finally there's Ryan Smith of AnandTech, who again is using the Zotac version of the card, who both speaks on the price and has a collection of benchmarks, here showing FPS on the game DiRT 2 at 1680 x 1050 Ultra High Quality + 4xAA:

"The MSRP on the GTX 560-448 will be $289, however launch partners will be free to price it higher to match any factory overclocks they do. At $289 the GTX 560-448 is priced extremely close to the cheapest GTX 570s, and depending on clockspeeds and sales a GTX 570 could end up being the same price or cheaper, so it will be prudent to check prices. Meanwhile the GTX 560-448's closest competition from AMD will be the Radeon HD 6950, which trends around $250 after rebate while the Radeon HD 6970 is still closer to $340. Overall NVIDIA's pricing may be a bit high compared to their other products, but compared to AMD's products it's consistent with the performance. ... With DIRT 2 our benchmarks once again swing back in favor of NVIDIA. At 1920 the GTX 560-448 is 14% of the 6970, never mind the 6950. The advantage over the GTX 560 Ti is even greater, with the GTX 560-448 coming in at nearly 20% faster. Throw on Zotac's overclock and now the GTX 560-448 is as fast as the GTX 570. If you still don't believe the GTX 560-448 is really a slower GTX 570, then this should be rather convincing proof." – Smith

And of course we're interested in your opinions as well – what do you think of this product as a possibility for your setup in the near future? Orangy enough for you?