Zotac GTX 560 Ti OC Reviewed

When it comes to building a gaming computer, most people really tend to cheap out on the GPU without realizing the importance of having a good GPU. There is no doubt that you still need a good CPU and RAM as those will cause bottlenecks as well, but for most gamers the GPU is the most important factor in their rig. As such, many gamers overlook too many GPUs as a result of price.

Zotac, though, has been able to deliver a relatively good NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti graphics card for a very reasonable price. Today we will be reviewing that card and taking a look at how it performs against the competition as well as older generation higher performance cards.

Specifications
The Zotac GTX 560 Ti OC [ZT-50303-10M] is an overclocked version of Zotac's non-reference GTX 560 Fermi based graphics card. The GeForce 500 series is the updated, higher performance version of NVIDIA's GF100 also known as GF110. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti, though, is a GF 114 chip unlike the GTX 570 and GTX 580. There are versions of the GTX 560 Ti that have 448 shader cores instead of the standard 384 cores. This is because the 448 core version is really a GF110 GTX 570 that couldn't quite make the cut to be a 570.



Nevertheless, this card is a GTX 560 Ti and it does come pre-overclocked. NVIDIA's stock clocks for the GTX 560 Ti are listed at 822 MHz core clock and 1645 MHz shader clock with an effective 4 GHz memory clock on 1GB of GDDR5. This card, though, comes pre-overclocked at 850 MHz core and 1800 MHz shader clock. We will take a look at this overclock and see if there's any additional overclocking headroom built into this non-reference card later in the review.



Because of the non-reference nature of this card we also wanted to check out the cooler and see how effectively it cooled the card as well as remained quiet while doing so. In the next section of the review we will cover this aspect of the card.