Installation
Installation is quite simple, you remove your current card, line this one up and push it in till the PCIe slot lock goes “click”, then attach the output end of the card to your case via whatever mechanism your case uses. Lastly, plug the two six pin PCIe connectors in, and you’re ready to rumble!
As you can see, the fans are far from small, but the card itself is a normal two-slot design. You should be able to get a pair of these into any motherboard that supports SLI.
Test Setup
| Processor | Intel Core i7 2600K (LGA1155) |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte P67a-UD4-B3 |
| Ram | G.Skill Ripjaws X 2133mhz 2x2gb kit |
| Graphics Card | Gigabyte Geforce GTX 560 (1Gb GDDR5) |
| Hard Drive | Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gb 7200rpm |
| Optical Drive | LG x24 DVD-RW Re-writer SATA |
| CPU Cooler | Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme (TRUE) |
| Power Supply | Silverstone Strider 1000w |
| Chassis | InWin Ironclad Full Tower |
| Network | Intel Gigabit Ethernet PCI |
| Monitor | 22″ HP w2207h (1680×1050) |
| OS | Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit |
I tested the Gigabyte GTX560 with the above machine, it’s a nice modern system and has plenty of grunt for driving the GTX560. We’ll be using the following to examine the performance and features of this card:
- GPU-Z
- AIDA64
- 3D Mark Vantage (DX10)
- 3D Mark 11 (DX11)
- Unigine Heaven (DX11)
- Lost Planet 2 (DX11)
Nvidia Drivers
It used to be that installing drivers could be a real nightmare, these days Nvidia has things nicely figured out, and it’s quite simple to do, hence we won’t talk much about the driver installation process.
PhysX Configuration
The only point really worth noting is PhysX. PhysX allows the GPU to do physics calculations, freeing up the CPU for other tasks. The plus side is that the GPU is far more powerful than the CPU for such things, so you can get lots of very nice physics effects in the game you’re playing. Cloth effects and breaking glass are two major selling points. The down side is that every bit of power used for PhysX is not being used to drawing new frames, so your frame rate will suffer. If you have >60fps then by all means turn PhysX on, if you’re below that it may be in your best interest to turn it off. To do so, right click on your desktop and select “NVIDIA Control Panel”, then select “3D Settings”, and “Set PhysX Configuration” (If you have multiple GPUs installed this will mention SLI as well, and have the controls for enabling and disabling SLI). Once you’re on the page it will look like the screenshot below. Not surprisingly the dropdown box allows you to disable PhysX. If you have multiple GPUs installed it will also let you choose which GPU you want to calculate the PhysX on.
