TechieGroups

Every time a new GPU launches, it finds its way into half a dozen or more cards from different manufacturers. These manufacturers do their best to differentiate these cards from one another, usually by means of different fans, form factors, outputs, prices, or even a built-in overclock. It can sometimes be difficult to keep these differences straight – price comparisons are usually pretty easy to make on sites like Amazon or Newegg, but information about dimensions and clock speed can be more difficult to come by. So, I'd like to try something a little different.

I'd like to gather all of the information on these cards that I can from press releases, manufacturer product pages, and retailer sites, put it all in one place in an easy-to-parse format, and then distill it to help all of you make better buying decisions. This shouldn't be confused with one of our in-depth hardware reviews, nor am I necessarily trying to recommend one card over another – while one person may want a larger cooler or a higher stock clock, another person may need the shortest card they can find for a cramped case. If you find this helpful (or if it's missing something important that would make it more helpful to you), please give me feedback and let me know what you'd like to see!

The GPU I'm looking at today is the newly-released (and recently reviewed) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores, a low-end enthusiast card that trades blows with AMD's Radeon HD 6950 in most of our benchmarks (though it consistently beats the 6950 in the "longest, silliest name" benchmark). At present, there are five of these cards available on Newegg: one each from MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac, and two from EVGA. The table below lays out the important numbers for you.

 

Gigabyte

MSI

Zotac

EVGA (FTW)

EVGA (Classified)

Core Clock

732 MHz

880 MHz

765 MHz

797 MHz

797 MHz

Memory Clock (Effective)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

1002 MHz (4008 MHz)

950 MHz (3800 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

975 MHz (3900 MHz)

Shader Clock

1464 MHz

1760 MHz

1530 MHz

1594 MHz

1594 MHz

Dimensions (in mm)

280 x 136.6 x 43

243 x 115 x 42

228.6 x 111.3 x 33.5

228.6 x 111.15 x ??

266.7 x 111.15 x ??

Outputs

DVI-I, DVI-D, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, DisplayPort, HDMI

2x DVI-I, Mini HDMI

Power connectors

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

2x 6-pin

6-pin, 8-pin

Included cables

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Molex to 6-pin adapter, Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, 2x Molex to 6-pin adapter

DVI to VGA, Mini HDMI to HDMI, Molex to 6-pin adapter, 8-pin adapter

Warranty

3-year

3-year

2-year

3-year

3-year

Price (Newegg)

4.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

9.99

Common to all of these cards is 1280MB of GDDR5 memory on a 320-bit bus, dual-slot coolers, and manuals with driver CDs (though I imagine most of you reading this will toss out the manual and get new drivers directly from NVIDIA, as well you should). Now that we have all of the data, let's analyze it.

Gigabyte

Gigabyte's card gets a lot of "mosts" in this comparison – it's the most  expensive of the bunch, it has the most fans (3), and as a result of this massive cooler it's also the longest, tallest, and widest (we don't have width measurements for either EVGA card, but they're both smaller than this card in the other dimensions). This cooler, called the "Windforce 3X" in Gigabyte's press release, uses a vapor chamber to circulate heat. The three fans are said to be "ultra quiet" but no specific noise levels are given.

Despite this impressive cooling solution, Gigabyte is also the only manufacturer to adhere to NVIDIA's reference clock speeds for both the core and memory. I imagine that cooler could get enterprising overclockers some nice results, but Gigabyte won't be meeting you halfway.

The last item of note is that the Gigabyte card is the only one with a DVI-D port – the others all use two DVI-I ports. Along with its full-size HDMI and DisplayPort options, you should be able to plug just about any display into this thing. 

MSI

 

MSI's card, tied with Zotac's offering for second-most expensive, also comes with a fancy cooler, but is 40 mm shorter in length than the Gigabyte card. It's not the shortest card of the bunch, but it's not far off. MSI claims that the cooler, their well-reviewed Twin Frozr III (loving these names, by the way), is both 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference design, though "reference" in this case likely means NVIDIA's GTX 570 reference cooler since NVIDIA doesn't have a reference design for the GTX 560 Ti w/448 cores. MSI's specs list the card as being only 30dB loud at full speed – this is very impressive on paper (we recorded 43dB at idle and 47.1dB at load for the Zotac card's single-fan cooler), though keep in mind that this information comes from marketing materials and not hard data.

This card is also the fastest clocked of the group, with a roughly 17% faster core and 10% faster memory clock out of the box. If you don't want to venture into the potentially warranty-voiding field of overclocking, the MSI card may be your best bet for slightly higher frame rates.

With respect to outputs, this card is one of the most limited here – just two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port (a Mini HDMI to HDMI dongle is included), which has been NVIDIA's common reference configuration for the GTX 500 series. It shouldn't be a problem for most, but if you use DisplayPort you'll want to invest in an adapter.

Zotac

 

If you read our GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores review, this card will be familiar to you – this is the only one of the lot that we've actually had in our hands, and we came away fairly impressed by its performance, its array of outputs, and its cooler. Thanks to this single-fan cooler, it's tied with the EVGA FTW card for the shortest card in the group, but it only sports a modest 4% core overclock. It's also the only card of the lot  with a 2-year warranty instead of a 3-year warranty.

It ties with the MSI card for second-most expensive at 9.99, but it does appear to be the only card in the list that includes a game (Battlefield 3). Note that information on things like this can be hard to come by – the only place where the inclusion of Battlefield 3 is apparent is in our review and in the product photos on Newegg, two resources unavailable for the rest of these cards (for most of the others, Newegg has only pictures of the card and the box). If you don't already have Battlefield 3 and you want it, this card's value becomes much more competitive.

EVGA (FTW)

If price is your primary concern, this may be the card for you – of these five, the FTW-series card is the only one selling at NVIDIA's MSRP of 9. Its single-fan cooler ties it with the Zotac for smallest card here. The difference is that the EVGA card appears to use a partially shrouded cooler that only exhausts air out the front and rear, as opposed to the Zotac's open and perforated cooler.

This card's core and memory clocks are just a bit higher than Zotac's: an 8% overclock on the core and a 2.6% overclock on the memory. It's not much, but it's probably worth a few FPS. Output selection is also good – two DVI-I ports, full-size HDMI and a DisplayPort make this a solid-looking card, and if you don't need Battlefield 3 or a fancy cooler you may as well save yourself the (or , compared to the Gigabyte).

EVGA (Classified)

The EVGA Classified card's 8-pin power plug makes it a bit of an oddball – but we suspect EVGA is using a GTX 580 PCB here instead of a GTX 570 PCB as they did on the FTW. The core and memory speeds are the same as in the FTW-series card, so as with the other Classified cards this is really geared towards end-user overclocking rather than a factory overclock.

At any rate, the Classified-series card includes a large two-fan cooler that makes it the second longest in our lineup, though it's less wide than the Gigabyte cooler by a fair amount. For the price difference (this is the second cheapest card here), overclockers may prefer this to the FTW model for its cooling power and PCB, and to the Gigabyte and MSI cards for its slightly lower price, though overclocking speeds are of course never guaranteed.

Compared to the FTW model, DisplayPort users should note that this card regresses a bit in terms of available output – two DVI-I ports and a Mini HDMI port are all that's available, though like the MSI card EVGA is kind enough to include a Mini HDMI to HDMI adapter.

Back at CES 2011 EVGA showed off an interesting concept card featuring 2 GF104 GPUs on a single board. The resulting product was the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win, a true dual-GPU card packing 2 GTX 460s on to a single board. EVGA has since refined this product by replacing the GTX 460s with GTX 560 Tis, and today is launching the next 2Win card: the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win. Priced at 9, EVGA has the GTX 580 set in their sights, claiming to offer 30% better performance for the price. But can EVGA’s dual-GPU behemoth really surpass NVIDIA’s flagship video card? Let’s find out.

WITH THE MARGIN SQUEEZE in graphics cards, the vendors are hard pressed to churn out their own card designs with as many features as possible and add as much performance as they can within the limits of the GPU makers’ specifications.

Asus, as the biggest card vendor around, has multiple iterations of enhanced GPU cards that improve on the reference design. Here we look at the Asus pre-tweaked Direct CU II series, the high-end line just one notch below its highest-end ROG Matrix graphics card range, which is a subject for yet another story.

The Direct CU II series, offered with both AMD and Nvidia high-end designs, is basically a combination of three key enhancements and is now in its second generation.

First, there’s a huge, three-slots thick (yes, three slots!) dual fan cooler with five flattened direct contact copper heat pipes and a huge fin area for roughly 20 per cent cooler temperatures.

Then, improved board level ‘super alloy’ componentry uses a special alloy formula in critical power delivery components for a claimed 15 per cent performance boost, 35C cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan.

Finally, a voltage tweak feature provides for further overclocking capability up to 50 per cent above the reference clock, if you’re really keen on extreme overclocking.

While the fat three-slot cooling means you’re unlikely to ever run these cards in pairs, the extra space provides plenty of cooling air vent openings as well as four display connectors. Two dual link DVI jacks, one with VGA pass-through, are accompanied by full size HDMI and Displayport connectors. Nice.

WITH THE MARGIN SQUEEZE in graphics cards, the vendors are hard pressed to churn out their own card designs with as many features as possible and add as much performance as they can within the limits of the GPU makers’ specifications.

Asus, as the biggest card vendor around, has multiple iterations of enhanced GPU cards that improve on the reference design. Here we look at the Asus pre-tweaked Direct CU II series, the high-end line just one notch below its highest-end ROG Matrix graphics card range, which is a subject for yet another story.

The Direct CU II series, offered with both AMD and Nvidia high-end designs, is basically a combination of three key enhancements and is now in its second generation.

First, there’s a huge, three-slots thick (yes, three slots!) dual fan cooler with five flattened direct contact copper heat pipes and a huge fin area for roughly 20 per cent cooler temperatures.

Then, improved board level ‘super alloy’ componentry uses a special alloy formula in critical power delivery components for a claimed 15 per cent performance boost, 35C cooler operation and 2.5 times longer lifespan.

Finally, a voltage tweak feature provides for further overclocking capability up to 50 per cent above the reference clock, if you’re really keen on extreme overclocking.

While the fat three-slot cooling means you’re unlikely to ever run these cards in pairs, the extra space provides plenty of cooling air vent openings as well as four display connectors. Two dual link DVI jacks, one with VGA pass-through, are accompanied by full size HDMI and Displayport connectors. Nice.

NVIDIA’s GF104 and GF114 GPUs have been a solid success for the company so far. 10 months after GF104 launched the GTX 460 series, NVIDIA has slowly been supplementing and replacing their former 0 king. In January we saw the launch of the GF114 based GTX 560 Ti, which gave us our first look at what a fully enabled GF1x4 GPU could do. However the GTX 560 Ti was positioned above the GTX 460 series in both performance and price, so it was more an addition to their lineup than a replacement for GTX 460.

With each GF11x GPU effectively being a half-step above its GF10x predecessor, NVIDIA’s replacement strategy has been to split a 400 series card’s original market between two GF11x GPUs. For the GTX 460, on the low-end this was partially split off into the GTX 550 Ti, which came fairly close to the GTX 460 768MB’s performance. The GTX 460 1GB has remained in place however, and today NVIDIA is finally starting to change that with the GeForce GTX 560. Based upon the same GF114 GPU as the GTX 560 Ti, the GTX 560 will be the GTX 460 1GB’s eventual high-end successor and NVIDIA’s new 0 card.

The last time we checked in with iBUYPOWER we reviewed the behemoth that is the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC, a massive hunk of machine that was generally a solid value but suffered from the same kind of shaky overclocking that afflicted so many boutique builds during the era. This time iBUYPOWER is packing a K-series Sandy Bridge processor (complete with easy overclocking) and one of the most powerful graphics cards on the planet: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590. The 590 may ultimately not have had the performance to beat AMD's Radeon HD 6990, but it's also a much quieter card. iBUYPOWER managed to fit it into a MicroATX case (along with a 92mm water-cooling rig for the processor). Does the beefy LAN Warrior II work, and does it work well, and just how much will this bad boy set you back?

Back on Tuesday NVIDIA put out a quick teaser about a new video card that would be launching today. As virtually all of you correctly guessed, it was the GeForce GTX 590, NVIDIA’s latest dual-GPU monster. Coming only two weeks after the launch of the Radeon HD 6990, NVIDIA wants their spot back as the single card king, and it’s the GTX 590 that will fight for it. But does the GTX 590 have what it takes to dethrone the 6990 so soon? Let’s find out.

Throughout the lifetime of the 400 series, NVIDIA launched 4 GPUs: GF100, GF104, GF106, and GF108. Launched in that respective order, they became the GTX 480, GTX 460, GTS 450, and GT 430. One of the interesting things from the resulting products was that with the exception of the GT 430, NVIDIA launched each product with a less than fully populated GPU, shipping with different configurations of disabled shaders, ROPs, and memory controllers. NVIDIA has never fully opened up on why this is – be it for technical or competitive reasons – but ultimately GF100/GF104/GF106 never had the chance to fully spread their wings as 400 series parts.

It’s the 500 series that has corrected this. Starting with the GTX 580 in November of 2010, NVIDIA has been launching GPUs built on a refined transistor design with all functional units enabled. Coupled with a hearty boost in clockspeed, the performance gains have been quite notable given that this is still on the same 40nm process with a die size effectively unchanged. Thus after GTX 560 and the GF114 GPU in January, it’s time for the 3rd and final of the originally scaled down Fermi GPUs to be set loose: GF106. Reincarnated as GF116, it’s the fully enabled GPU that powers NVIDIA’s latest card, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

For the launch of the first GF100-based video cards – the GTX 480 and GTX 470 – NVIDIA sent over a 3 card reviewer’s kit containing two GTX 480s and a single GTX 470. This allowed us to do SLI testing with the GTX 480 (a money-is-no-object setup) but not with NVIDIA’s significantly cheaper GTX 470. As part of a comprehensive SLI & CrossFire guide we’re working on for next month we needed a second GTX 470 for testing GTX 470 SLI operation, and MSI answered our call with their N470GTX.

Today we’ll be taking a look at MSI’s GTX 470. We’ll also be taking a sneak-peek of our forthcoming SLI/CF guide with a look at GTX 470 SLI performance.