Introduction

You throw the x60 name on a new video card these days and you're going to expect big things from it. Let's be honest, I was going to say that the GTX 460 kicked ass, but we shouldn't be using past tense. Instead, the GTX 460 kicks ass.

It offered great performance from the second we saw the model. Sure, lots of cards offer great performance; look at the GTX 580, but that model carries with it quite a large price tag, like most high end cards do. The GTX 460 broke the mold, especially for NVIDIA, a company we tend to expect to pay more for when compared to its AMD competition who seems to focus strongly on value.

We saw it all from day one as well with the model; strong out of the box overclocks, awesome custom cooling designs and heaps of potential when it came to overclocking even further. When we got word that the GTX 560 Ti was coming, the first thing I thought was; is the card going to be as much of a game changer as the GTX 460 was?

Before I even tested it, though, I knew it wouldn't be. It couldn't be. While the GTX 460 was being looked at against the GTX 470 and GTX 480 which were plagued with problems in the sense of heat and noise, the GTX 570 and GTX 580 don't have that problem. They're significantly cooler running and quieter than their predecessors.

The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has two jobs to do; one is to help make sure that NVIDIA offer a broad range of pricing options for people wanting to get into the GTX 500 series, while the other is to lay the smack down on AMD. Priced under $250, the model clearly sits well with the GTX 570 costing $100 more, and the GTX 580 costing another $150 more on top of the GTX 570 for a price tag that's pretty much double of the GTX 560.

So there's only one more question; can it lay the smack down on AMD? Well, before we tell you that, let's check out the card itself that GIGABYTE is offering us. Once that's done we'll get into the fun stuff that we call benchmarking.

Because we got the card nice and early from GIGABYTE, we didn't get a package, so instead we'll be just getting stuck straight into the card itself on the next page. Quickly, though, we do know what's inside the package. We've got a mini HDMI to HDMI cable, DVI to VGA adapter and two 6-Pin PCI-E power connectors. We would assume the normal line-up of paperwork and the standard driver CD is there as well.