EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win review - Final words and conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Ever since release the GeForce GTX 560 Ti has been a success story really. For not too much money you can purchase a product that offers very nice mid-range performance. Time is changing though and one GTX 560 Ti seems to be 'okay' enough but is more a card effective up-to 1600x1200. Placing two GTX 560 TI card next to each other is a nice refreshing alternative offering heaps of performance, yes not everybody can and likes to go SLI in their system with two cards, equaling 2x more noise and 2x more heat.

It's for such end-users where the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win comes into play. It's a really nice alternative towards two cards in SLI (albeit doing exactly the same thing). The EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win offers a different approach all on one card, and that's exactly what people like. The noise levels are well under control, the heat output can be dealt with properly as well. But do make sure your PC has proper ventilation as this card is considered high end and dumping fast amounts of heat inside your PC.

A NF200 switch chip sits in-between the GPUs, typically that chip adds a little more latency hence we think EVGA boosted the core frequency of the GPUs a slight bit to compensate. What we would really have like to see was a slightly more aggressive beast though, how cool would it have been to see the two ratchet bastards clocked at say 900 MHz ? But hey, we're a little extreme when it comes to graphics card wishes and desires of course.

When it comes to gaming then any modern game up-to say a monitor resolution of 1920x1200 combined with 8x Antialiasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering can be played easily. The overall baseline performance is well above a GTX 580 when the two GPUs kick in. We do recommend you to stick at up-to 1920x1200, as after that resolution the 1GB per GPU framebuffer partitions could be a limiting factor with the latest games. Battlefield 3 for example was showing severe memory limitations at 2560x1600. That really is my biggest nag with a product of this caliber really, I would have loved to see 2GB per GPU framebuffers.

SLI mode, you will have noticed there is a SLI connector on the PCB. Unfortunately you can not add a second card to go for quad-SLI mode. It's not a hardware limitation, yet a limitation set by NVIDIA, the GTX 560 Ti series is only allowed in 2-way SLI mode, which this card already is.

Power consumption is a notch on the high side alright, but probably isn't too big of an issue when you look at the product from its high-end perspective, at 350 Watt peaks we can't say it's an energy friendly card though. But hey, that is expected. Mind you, our findings a are based on are peak graphics card power draw levels, the average power consumption will tell another story.

Overall you'll notice that this dual GTX 560 Ti series really offers a lot of performance, you can't complain; all modern DX11 and lower games will play absolutely fine up-to 1920x1200, and that's with superb image quality settings enabled at say 8xAA and 16xAF + very high in-game quality settings. Being an SLI card you do always have the risk of finding the latest SLI profile with the latest games. However you can make these yourself and both NVIDIA and EVGA are really fast with SLI profile updates so that is not really a big thing we feel.

As with anything that sells, the success of the product will depend on the pricing level. This is the one quirk that could be a little bothersome. If you pick up two GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards you'll spend roughly $460 USD, the EVGA GeForce GTX Ti 2Win will cost you $519 and that adds a 60 USD price premium. A single GeForce GTX 580 can be found for under 500 USD these days. So that seems a little hard to justify, hence why we would have liked to see a little more bite out of the GPU clocks to give it that little extra edge, well that or bigger memory partitions. Overall though it remains a fair deal for a unique product, that is truly silly fast.

The reality for the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win remains that its amongst the fastest graphics cards currently available. Your fillrate will drip of your screen with drooling framerates versus excellent output image quality. The choice in-between two GTX 560 Ti cards or one GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win will be a difficult one. We say, go with you gut feeling as either way you are fine. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win is all about innovation, it's a very wicked card that we can certainly recommend.

Now then, back to BF3 ... tsssk these ratchet frickin reviews all the time ;)

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