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Review: Powerful and Silent

Our guest today is Gaiwnard GTX 560 Ti Phantom. The card is a part of Gainward’s Phantom line, aimed at those who like their cooling effective but silent. GTX 580 and GTX 570 already received Gainward’s Phantom treatment, so we guess it’s expected to see the GTX 560 Ti get the same remake.

Although our card comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, Gainward also offers a 2048MB version. We thought that testing the 1024MB versions will probably be wiser as 2GB cards tend to be pricier while not justifying the price difference on the gaming front.

Gainward GTX 560 Ti Phantom 1GB stands at €234, whereas Gainward GTX 560 Ti Phantom 2GB comes at €350, here.

Note that the 2GB version runs at reference clocks, whereas the 1GB version comes factory overclocked. However, the overclock is relatively small as you can see from the GPUZ shot below.

Nvidia set GTX 560 Ti reference clocks pretty high compared to the rest of Fermi cards. Namely, GPU runs at 822MHz, shaders at 1644MHz and the memory at 4008MHz. When the card is idle, the clocks go pretty low – 50.6MHz for the GPU, 101MHz for shaders and 67.5MHz for the memory.

The GTX 560 Ti’s ticker is the GF114 GPU, which received plenty of positive acclaim so far and we’ve seen that the card boasts nice performance-per-clock ratio as well.

Before we move on to the card, let us remind you that the GF114 is a derivation of GF104, as is evident from the number of transistors (1.95 billion). However, the GF114 packs a few improvements inherited from the GF110.