Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti SOC review - Introduction

With the reference review out of the way it's time to check out the first NVIDIA partner review on a GeForce GTX 560. The reference review showed you guys that NVIDIA has nothing to be ashamed about when it comes to the baseline performance of the GTX 560 Ti, the overclock potential however was really impressive.

And AIB/AIC partners realized that very much, you'll spot products clocked at core frequencies of 900 MHz and some of them will even brute force attack that upper threshold, that's right ... 1 GHz on the core and thus 2 GHz on the 384 GPU shader processors.

The product in queue for review today comes from Gigabyte, they unleashed a product tagged as SOC edition (Super OverClock), and that surely applies as the GeForce GTX 560 Ti SOC (GV-N560SO-1GI) is brutally clocked at in the factory at 1 GHz for you (reference is 822 MHz). The full gigabyte of 256-bit gDDR5 memory clocks in at 4580 MHz (effective data rate) over the reference 4008 MHz. All very promising.

This SOC edition is based on 'Gauntlet' Sorting, meaning Gigabyte picks out the best cards, tests them and only if they quality they will apply as SOC model. Gigabyte also has it's own PCB manufactured and uses quality components under their Ultra Durable strategy, a card with a 6+1-phase power design and power phase LED indicators and of course ... it comes with the lovely WindForce 2x cooler, a dual fan cooler that in the past has proven to be very silent whilst offering good cooling performance.

Anyway, have a quick peek and then head onwards into the review shall we ?