Product Listing

Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Fans

By Kenny Yeo - 18 Feb 2011

Conclusion

An Unconventional but Decent Take

On a whole, the Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom is an interesting and decent take on NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti SKU.

As we had predicted, because of its mildly higher clock speeds, it wasn’t that much faster than a reference card. However, we found its unconventional cooler to be pretty effective. Under load, the card recorded a maximum sustained temperature of 62 degrees Celsius, which is good, though it couldn't best the earlier tested ASUS ENGTX560 Ti DCII TOP. Another plus point is that it was also very quiet even when under load. Unfortunately, the unconventional cooler is also larger than most, taking up a good two and a half expansion slots, which, depending on the layout of your motherboard, might mean sacrificing either a PCI or PCIe slot.

Price-wise, the Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom comes in at US$260, which is about US$10 more than most other GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards. You could easily find cards with higher clock speeds for the same money, so whether the Gainward card deserves the premium depends very much on whether you think the cooler and its quiet operation is worth the extra dough. Personally, considering that the card is only mildly overclocked and that the cooler isn’t significantly better than other implementations from rivals, we think that the GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom would be better received if it didn’t have a premium pricing.

The Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom has an interesting-looking cooler that actually works, but it might find itself outpriced in this highly competitive segment of the market.

Taking everything into account, the Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom is a competent card. Performance is decent, although it could certainly have done with higher clock speeds; and we like that Gainward has improved the options for video output, offering a VGA port and proper, full-size HDMI port instead of a reference card’s mini-HDMI one. Additionally, the cooler offers improved levels of cooling performance, but its large size, means that it’s not for everyone. Crucially, its size might complicate multi-GPU setups and make upgrading via SLI in future a hassle.

So in a nutshell, the Gainward GeForce GTX 560 Ti Phantom might not be the best GeForce GTX 560 Ti card out there, but its unorthodox cooler distinguishes it from the crowd and overall performance isn’t half-bad either.

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8.0
  • Performance 8
  • Features 8
  • Value 7.5
The Good
Effective cooler
Improved selection of video output ports
The Bad
Conservative clock speeds
Large cooler occupies up to 3 expansion slots
Slightly pricey
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