Final Words & Conclusion
At the initial launch wave of these products I estimate that prices will be closer to 200 EUR rather then closer to 150 EUR for a single GeForce GTX 560. But give it a few weeks and when the dust settles the prices will drop. There will be good volume available, no doubt so once all them hardware farmers are well stocked, it will make prices drop.
So for now let's hypothetically say you can find an awesome deal at 150 EUR per card. Then for 300 EUR you could create a SLI setup and as you have been able to see it blows away the GeForce GTX 580 by a good margin -- again for roughly 300 EUR. That makes the GeForce GTX 560 SLI in mid-range a lot of sense !
Yeah it is no surprise to see the GeForce GTX 560 perform the way it does. Ever since the release of the 400/500 series SLI performance with two cards has been great. Where you'll quickly run into some CPU limitations on cards like the GeForce GTX 580 and 590, this 560 Ti seems makes a lot of sense combined with a decent modern processor.
Performance wise, little negative can be said about the GeForce GTX 560 setup in SLI. Heat and noise will hardly go up depending on your configuration and remain very acceptable. If you can, please place the cards as far away from each other as possible, a special flexible SLI bridge is required for that though, like the one shown on page two of this article.
Download the series 275 driver from here.
What we like very much is that as of today with the new drivers the GeForce drivers will have a new feature, they can now automatically update AA and SLI profiles. Once you can enable the feature the driver will contact NVIDIA on a regular basis, download profiles and silently installs them. That means when a new game is a=out, your driver will probably already have been updated in the application profiles segment, and supporting that game. Great idea, it saves you the hassle of waiting on, seeking and installing a new driver as the updated application profile will be enough to get you started in SLI.
Power consumption then, the two GPUs consume roughly 300 Watt, add to that the rest of your system (processor, chipset peripherals) at say 200 watt and you'll find yourself in the 500 Watt power consumption region when playing a hefty game. If you plan to overclock CPU and GPUs, then make sure you add another 200W on your PSU requirements. Keep that in mind okay ? Ass with SLI you gave entered the more extreme high-end arena, it never has been any different.
Scaling with the more GPU stringent monitor resolutions starting at 1600x1200 and modern games you can gain 1.5x ~ 1.9x performance with two of these cards and that really is commendable. Bare in mind though, to be able to operate two or more cards in SLI mode you'll need a SLI compatible motherboard, most X58, P67 and Z68 motherboards are SLI certified, some P55 motherboards as well. Carefully make sure and check that out before opting for SLI and thus already purchasing a second card.
Driver compatibility - In all our test we had no driver issues whatsoever, not even Anno 1404 went belly up for a change. All games worked straight out of the box and all games show good performance scaling.
So there you have it, two GTX 560 cards setup in SLI will still cost you say 350 EUR and when prices settle maybe 300 EUR, for that money you'll gain a truckload of performance kicking your configuration into the highest gear performance wise while spending less money compared to say a GeForce GTX 580. With SLI you might run into some sort of small driver issue at one point in time, also compared to the GTX 580 you will consume a bit more power. The flipside of the coin however is that the performance beats even the fastest single GPU based graphics card tested to date.
Whatever you preference might be, either way we doubt you'll regret the choice you will make as this certainly has been a satisfying experience from A to Z. SLI with the GeForce GTX 560?, sure definitely recommended.
Read our other GeForce GTX 560 reviews.
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