Feature Articles

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti - A New Titan Rises

By Kenny Yeo - 25 Jan 2011

Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking

Temperature

In our test, we found that the reference card recorded a peak operating temp of 70 degrees Celsius, which is actually impressive considering its extra hardware and fairly high clock speeds. Comparatively, the GeForce GTX 460 ran at 67 degrees Celsius, only a smidge cooler, and the GeForce GTX 470 came in at a toasty 94 degrees Celsius.

As for the two custom cards, the ASUS card and its DirectCU II cooler worked well, helping the card record a breezy 60 degrees Celsius. As for the Palit card, that was a bit disappointing because despite having a dual-fan cooler, it still recorded 70 degrees Celsius. And considering both the ASUS and Palit cards have identical clock speeds, it just goes to show how much more effective ASUS’ custom cooler is. The catch is that you'll have to take into consideration of a bigger card from ASUS, while the Palit is a much more compact card with better performance than the reference card and is no warmer than it.

 

Power Consumption

If there’s one thing that we didn’t like about the new GeFore GTX 560 Ti was its rather high power requirements. NVIDIA has made good progress in reducing the power requirements of their Fermi cards beginning with the GeForce GTX 460, and we’ve seen massive improvements too in the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570. But looking at the figures we’ve recorded here, it seems that NVIDIA has taken one step back. Idle power readings are encouraging, but at load, we recorded a maximum sustained reading of a hefty 272W, which is considerable higher than the GeForce GTX 460 and comparable with the old GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 580.

Although the two factory overclocked cards recorded comparable idle power draw readings, at load, they fared a little worse, as we recorded figures that weren’t too far off against the GeForce GTX 570. Beginning with the GeForce GTX 460, NVIDIA has made great improvements to keep power requirements modest, but if figures here are anything to go by, it seems that they have dropped the ball a little with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Perhaps in a bid to appease the raw performance orientated crowd, they traded power for performance, which is something most folks building new PCs can afford to spare - generally speaking.

 

Overclocking

NVIDIA claims the GeForce GTX 560 Ti was built with overclockers in mind, and to that end, they have included a 4-phase power circuitry, faster 5Gbps memory modules, an additional copper heat pipe and enlarged heatsink and cooling fan. Well, we’re pleased to say that their efforts have paid off as we managed a respectable 960MHz at the core and 4500MHz DDR at the memory, giving us 10719 3DMarks - an improvement of 1298 3DMarks or 13%.

The two custom GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards from ASUS and Palit did competitively well in our overclocking tests too. The ASUS card managed a maximum overclocking state of 950MHz at the core and 4600MHz DDR at the memory, attaining 10756 3DMarks in the process - an improvement of 5%. On the other hand, the Palit card recorded a lower core clock speed of 940MHz, but managed a higher memory clock speed of 4900Mhz DDR, resulting in 10852 3DMarks.

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