GeForce GTX 560 Ti review - Introduction

The sheer amount of new and updated graphics cards released lately is quite amazing.

Typically in the past around CeBIT time and Christmas you'll see product releases in the graphics arena. But with competition being this stiff it seems that each month or two we see new products being introduced.

It's now January 2011 -- Typically a very slow month for new hardware introductions as face it, most money was spend during the holiday season already. Regardless we had several major releases this month, and we'll now add another one. Positioned in the lower high-end segment and aimed against the Radeon HD 6870, NVIDIA is unleashing the series 560 Ti graphics cards.

Ti -- does that ring any bells?  Well for those that can't remember it, NVIDIA started Ti (Titanium) branding in the GeForce 3 era many many moons ago; which stretched all the way to products like GeForce 4 Ti 4200 back in the year 2002. After 2003 the Ti series came to a grinding halt as the naming schema had to be changed to GeForce FX.

One thing we can say about the current NVIDIA's GTX 400/500 series naming schema is that it is very clear to the end user, so we find it a bit unfortunate to see confusing SE and Ti tags all of the sudden again. The market can definitely do without it.

Anyways, back to the GeForce GTX 560 Ti itself, aimed against the Radeon HD 6800 series the GeForce GTX 560 Ti is based on a new GPU refresh, the GF114 silicon which features 384 shader processors, a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and a core clock speed of 822 MHz.

All factors combined deliver a product onto the market that is quite interesting performance and features wise, a product that is noiseless and has a power consumption level we can all life with.

But hey now, have a quick peek at the reference model and then let's head onwards into the review.