MSI GeForce GTX 560 Twin Frozer II review - Introduction

NVIDIA has been readying a new SKU based on the GF114 GPU: the GeForce GTX 560, yes correct, without the "Ti" extension. It's being released to compete with AMD's Radeon HD 6790 and 6850 series primarily.

AMD has unveiled that affordable Radeon HD 6790 a few weeks ago which closes in on that GeForce 550/560 segment fairly well. Next to that the R6800 is a hard one to compete with. Hence all the more reason for NVIDIA to introduce another GPU.

The GeForce GTX 560 has 336 CUDA/Shader cores enabled which is the very same configuration as last year's GF104-based GTX 460. It has 56 Texture memory units and something quite lovely for a product in this price segment, a full 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface holding 1 GB of memory.

So pretty much this hints towards last year's GeForce GTX 460, yet based on a new fabrication node, clock speeds, and its overclocking potential is simply much higher, a known fact on the GF11x GPUs in general.

Another factor will be better temperatures and a hopefully better TDP. Well, we loved the GTX 460 for what it was alright, armed with improved tweaking potential and a much better price, let's see what this card series brings to the table.

The GeForce GTX 560 we'll be reviewing in this article comes from MSI, of course they sent in their MSI GTX560 Twin Frozer II (OC version) which offers higher performance than the non-OC GTX560 right out of the the box.

MSI applies a custom PCB, all dark, factory overclocks the product and adds the Twin Frozer revision II cooler, which we personally are not a big fan of in terms of noise levels. Armed with the latest AfterBurner tweaking software, the product does allow for it to be voltage tweaked ... as such we'll take her over 1000 MHz in this review. Have a peek and then let's dive into the review.