Zotac AMP! Geforce GTX 560 (1Gb GDDR5) Review

Last year Nvidia launched the new and improved Fermi cards that aimed to fix the issues from the 400-series. One card from that 400-series wasn’t plagued with those issues, and thrived in the budget market.

This review will be looking at the Zotac AMP! Geforce GTX 560  (1Gb GDDR5) graphics card. The GTX560 is aimed at the midrange market, where people want good performance but dont necessarily want to pay $500 for a video card. Sure you wont be able to play at super-high resolutions, but you should be fine on pretty much every other resolution out there.

To re-cap ….

• The GTX460 was a downright beast in its price-range. Nvidia has improved on the success of that card, and has beefed it up for the 500-series.
• This GTX560 has all of the low power capabilities, yet has stepped it up a notch and delivers pounding performance for a fraction of the price of a top of the line card.
• The GTX560 has the impressive power to make another card in the 500-series line pretty much redundant. With added factory overclocks, there is the ability to make the GTX560 Ti not needed at all. Lets see some more about the card:

The Geforce  GTX 560  features all of  Nividia’s 3D technologies, which includes CUDA, DX11, OpenGL 4.2, PhysX, Nvidia’s 3D Vision, support for 2-way SLI multi-GPU, as well as HD hardware video decode acceleration. Reference clocks for a GTX560 are 810mhz core clock, and 1000mhz (4000mhz effective speed) memory.

This particular model from Zotac features a a factory overclocked speed of 950Mhz core. It contains total of 336 CUDA cores, and comes with 1Gb of GDDR5 ram using a 256-bit memory interface, running at 1100mhz (4400mhz effective speed). Those factory overclocks are quite impressive, 140mhz core clock is a huge overclock from the factory. It is nice to be guaranteed that your card will run that fast out of the box since overclocking is never a sure thing.

For connectivity, you get a mini HDMI and dual DVI outputs. Accessories include a DVI-to-VGA converter, 2 x PCI-E power cables, and a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter. The package includes a full version of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (DX11) game, which is a welcome addition since most companies don’t include games these days.

Priced at $220, this AMP! edition card is very competitive for the money. You get a huge overclock out of the factory, as well as a dual-fan heatsink to keep your card nice and cool. Compared to a GTX570, you are saving well over $100. This card is very similar to the popular GTX460, but Nvidia has taken that cards success and slapped on a supercharger to kick it up another notch.

We’ll be testing the Zotac AMP! Geforce GTX 560  (1Gb GDDR5) on a new test rig, which consist of the following … Intel Core i7 – 2600k @ 4.0ghz (LGA 1156), Gigabyte P67A-UD4-B3 motherboard, 4Gb G-Skill Ripjaw X 2133mhz memory, Custom water loop cooler and an Antec 1200w Quattro power supply.

Enough of all the pleasantries, and lets get down to business!

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