Item: ASUS (NVIDIA) GeForce GTX 560 graphics-card
Author: Tarinder Sandhu

ASUS (NVIDIA) GeForce GTX 560 graphics-card review

Final thoughts and rating

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 (non-Ti) is launched to fill the price and performance gap between the GTX 460 1GB and GTX 560 Ti cards. This new GPU is a cut-down version of the Ti insofar as it has a portion of the processing core removed or disabled. Accordingly, our benchmarks show that the GTX 560 is about 10 per cent slower than the Ti on a clock-for-clock basis.

Buying advice is relatively straightforward for this card. Anyone with a year-old, mid-range GPU - GeForce GTX 460 1GB or Radeon HD 5850, for example - doesn't need to bother looking here; it's more of a sideways step than a genuine upgrade. However, readers eyeing up a new PC build or upgrading from a three-year-old setup should put it on their shortlist; it's a quality card that starts at £150: purchase it or a Radeon HD 6870 and you can't go too far wrong.

But NVIDIA has given its partners license to construct retail cards with custom coolers and a range of frequencies. ASUS has grabbed this opportunity to slap the excellent DirectCu II heatsink on top of a GTX 560. This £175 card is clocked in at 925MHz core and 4,200MHz memory, meaning performance is very similar to stock GTX 560 Ti and Radeon HD 6950 2GB's.

All told, the GeForce GTX 560 is a sensible and much-needed introduction that solidifies NVIDIA's mid-range graphics-card stack. A fundamentally better card than the anaemic GTX 550 Ti, do consider it if gaming at 1080p with high-quality settings is your cup of tea - especially if you're partial to NVIDIA-only features such as PhysX, 3D Vision and SLI.

The Good

Clocked at 925MHz out the box
Ideal for high-quality 1080p gaming
Excellent cooler
Looks the business

The Bad

Cynically, not much more than a pre-overclocked GTX 460 1GB

HEXUS Rating

ASUS GTX 560 DirectCU II TOP
(ENGTX560 DCII TOP/2DI/1GD5)

HEXUS Awards

ASUS GTX 560 DirectCU II TOP
(ENGTX560 DCII TOP/2DI/1GD5)

HEXUS Where2Buy

TBC.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!

Given that 5870s are now £150 it'd be interesting to see how they do against the GTX 560, I expect they'd blow it out the water.

Scan and OcUK have had the MSI HD6870 1GB HAWK for around £148 to £155 for weeks now.

You can get an HD5870 1GB for around £150 as kalniel has mentioned.

This custom HD5870 1GB looks very good for around £160:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-gigabyte-hd-5870-oc-pci-e-21-(x16)-4800mhz-gddr5-gpu-870mhz-1600-cores-2x-dvi-hdmi-dp

I don't know where Hexus get their pricing from, you can get factory OC 560ti's for £180 and I paid £150 for my stock 560ti (which has nicely overclocked to 950 with a little fettling)

would it be possible to get SLI numbers for this ? i find at this price point it's the perfect card to go to SLI as they become a power combination for a great price

I'm not sure why Starcraft II was included all of a sudden? Looking at the aggregate scores of past reviews should be enough to see that the benchmark choice was somewhat kind to the Nvidia cards already without adding yet another game in favour of the green team.

560 ti > 6950? You won't see that anywhere else, and now this cut down “TOP” is supposed to be faster too? Sites like Toms and Anand had it slightly slower than the 6870 let alone faster than the 6950.

550 ti > 6790? Not on the huge majority of websites it isn't.

gtx 460 > 6850? Although close the consensus is the 6850 is the faster card, but not here.

It was fine before but adding in SC2 is just another way of making the Nvidia cards look a lot better than they are. Not impressed, especially given that huge 560 Banner at the top of the main page today as well.