MSI GTX 560 Ti-448 1280MB Twin Frozr III Power Edition Video Card Review

Introduction

The launch of the new GTX 560 Ti 448 today I think is a prime example of why NVIDIA does so well in the video card market. You just have to look at the current release schedule of games, or the games that have just recently been released and know that we're going to have a flood of PC Gamers get their game on over the next few months.

Unfortunately no one has any new high end cards ready to go and instead at the moment we're seeing refreshes of popular models from partners, but nothing from the AMD / NVIDIA level today.

Rumors of the GTX 560 Ti 448 Core card have been around for a little bit now and were pretty much confirmed the other week as pictures of partners cards came out, but there hasn't been as much talk about this model as you might expect. The launch of the Sandy Bridge-E platform from Intel, though, stole a lot of attention. Combined with the fact that the new GTX 560 Ti 448 we're looking at today is going to be released only into specific regions means that not everyone has needed to pay attention to it, because not everyone is going to have access to it.

Reserved mainly for North America and Europe, the new model is designed to sit between the much loved GTX 560 Ti and the higher end GTX 570 which has always been a bit of a dull card. Before we get into the performance side of things, though, the first thing we need to do is take a closer look at the MSI GTX 560 Ti 448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition card we have on hand. We'll start with a look at the package before moving onto the card itself which will then lead us into the specifications side of things.

Once we've done all that, we'll of course get into the performance side and see just what the new NVIDIA model is doing for us before we wrap everything up. But first, let's get into the package to see what MSI are offering us here today.

The Package

Looking at the box, you can see that MSI has opted for a design that opens up and gives us a look at the card. This is something we generally see on their higher end models, but being part of the "Power Edition" series definitely makes it stand out a bit more. You can see as you move throughout the box there's just an absolute wealth of information talking about the benefits the "Power Edition" tags bring along with talk about the Twin Frozr III cooler.

Moving inside the box, there's not heaps going on with some paperwork, driver CD, two Dual Molex to 6-Pin PCIe power connectors along with a DVI to VGA and mini HDMI to HDMI converter.