The regular GeForce GTX 560 (thus non Ti model) is as interesting as a GTX 460 or even 470 really, based on the newer chip it has been tweaked offers better performance, better power yet still a little high consumption and a better price. All wins in my book. The card can keep up in the mid-range segment really well.

What's tiresome though is that the past year or two we are only seeing refresh products in that mid-range segment mostly. So it is again the same performance, the same features just in another jacket -- yep the saturation of the market is humongous. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing, but what the graphics market needs badly is some change, we like to see some new features alright. I guess we'll have to wait on the next generation of products where we'll hopefully see some new innovation.

ECS then, the product is as reference as it can be. Now if you compare the baseline performance to the factory overclocked GTX 560 cards then there's definitely a noticeable difference. Of course that will relate to the price as well as the reference clocked and cooled products will be the cheapest ones to get. Purchase a pre-overclocked product, and you'll spend another tenner maybe two.

Fact remains though that in it's current design this product really offers nice baseline performance for the money. And the tweakability e.g. overclock potential is nothing to be ashamed of either. Apply a tiny bit of voltage tweaking and you will get close to the 1 GHz threshold on the GPU. memory wise this product allowed to be overclocked the most, we got the memory from 4000 MHz (effective) towards 5126 MHz (effective) and with products in the low and mid-range segment, memory bandwidth matters alright.

So this product being reference can be found in the 159 EUR / 189 USD bracket. This card will offer you best performance with monitor resolution up-to 1600x1200. Most games however will play fine at 1920x1200 as well, and that thus oozes value for money. Examples are Colin McRae Dirt, even at 8xAA in 1920x1200 is pushes 64 FPS on average. The GPU dominating Battlefield Bad Company 2 at 8xAA on average delivers 42 FPS at a monitor resolution of 1920x1200, these are all values that simply indicated that this little product has plenty of power for some modern age games alright. And worthy of a mention, while doing so the card remains absolutely silent.

Overall we feel that this regular (reference clocked) GeForce GTX 560 series is a decent product that can be welcomed in the 159~169 EUR mid-range graphics card market.

These products however remain more of the same gear we've been seeing for a long time now. But when you focus at performance versus money, yeah sure then the ECS GTX560 will be a nice alternative with excellent tweaking possibilities. The market might be saturated with a lot of the same products, performance and features but is sure is nice for the end-consumer to have so much diversity and choice. If you like to purchase a GTX 560 at bargain price, that's where ECS will come into play. Combine that with a few tweaks of your own and you'll have this card up and running almost as fast as the more expensive OC products.

• Leave/read comments on this product
• Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article
• Or go back to Guru3D's front page