Verdict and Conclusion
In short this GTX560OC is a good card at stock clocks, and an excellent one once you overclock it.
At stock clocks it performs quite well for it’s $200 price tag, and should happily run pretty much any game you might be after, assuming you don’t have a very high priced monitor (or multiple monitors), and really if you do you have the money to buy a GTX570 (or two…) or GTX580, anyway.
Once overclocked this card will make you wonder why people pay more for higher end cards on single monitors, it is quite impressive!
The Geforce GTX 560 GPU is capable of using all of Nividia’s 3D technologies, which include CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.2, PhysX, Nvidia’s 3D Vision, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. However, unlike the GTX 570 and the flagship GTX 580, which can support 3-way or even 4-way SLI for multi-GPU configuration, the Geforce GTX 560 only supports 2-way SLI. It’s an understandable choice by Nvidia, they don’t want 3xSLI GTX560s eating into the GTYX580 market, but I’d still like to be able to do crazy things like 4way SLI with these beasts.
Appearance wise, Gigabyte’s Geforce GTX 560 looks very nice, if almost identical to their GTX560Ti. This isn’t especially surprising as both cards are based on the same core and have the same ram configuration. The Ti version has a different shroud on the cooler, but that’s about it for visible differences.
As mentioned before, this card didn’t come with a retail package, so I can’t really tell you anything about that. Connectivity wise, this Gigabyte GTX560 has two DVI ports and one Mini-HDMI port. I’d like to see a full size HDMI port, but finding space for it would be difficult.
The heatsink/fan combo meanwhile performs very well indeed, I’m impressed. It runs cool and quiet even overclocked!
All told, this is a very solid card. It’s $200 price tag puts it in between AMD’s 6870($180ish), and their 6950 ($220-240), so there isn’t really anything worth comparing it against directly.
Performance wise the GTX560 beats the 6870 handily in HWBot’s version of Heaven (I scored a 1071 overclocked), the all time absolute record for a 6870 is 1095, only 25 points higher than this card, but that 6870 was volt modded and cooled to around 100*c below zero! Given the same treatment, this GTX560 would annihilate the 6870. Not surprisingly it loses to the 6950, but the 6950 also costs substantially more money.
This makes the Gigabyte GeForce GTX560 an excellent value!
The cooling solution on this card is top notch, even overclocked 21% with 8% more voltage I never heard the fans. Manually setting them to full speed I could hear a little bit of rushing air noise, and if I stuck my head inside the case I could hear a little bit of motor noise. These things are quiet!
Final words: The Gigabyte GTX560 is an excellent card, it performs nicely at stock, fantastically after being overclocked, the card is well priced as well. The only part I don’t like is the somewhat flimsy feeling to the top of the cooler.
Higher stock clocks would be nice too, this card has clocks at the lower end of GTX560s out there. Overclocking fixes this, but between the lowish clock speed and the flimsy feeling cooler, I’m docking half a point.
Not having a retail box I can’t give or take points for that, but I do know what is in the average gigabyte GPU box, and they usually send you everything you need and then some. Overall, I give this card 9.5 of 10 points, there really isn’t much room for improvement at all. This is an excellent card!
Winston’s Comments: Looking at the results produced by the Gigabyte Geforce GTX 560 OC (at factory pre-overclock speeds), I was extremely impressed. It was much better than I expected and comes very close to the Geforce GTX 560 Ti. What’s even better, is that this card can overclock even further … as Bobnova have shown. with an overclocked speed of 1030 Mhz … this card really kicks ass, almost as good as a GTX 570 … not bad for a $200 graphics card.
SCORE
9.5/10
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