Zotac GTX 560 Ti OC Reviewed

Overclocking


In terms of overclocking, we were able to squeeze an additional 52 MHz out of the already overclocked 850 MHz overclock from NVIDIA's stock 822 MHz. At 902 MHz we were essentially running at about a 10% total overclock and the card actually did a very good job of keeping the GPU cool as the chip on the GPU never went over 72C when under full load and overclocked. We believe that we could have attained better results if Zotac included an overclocking utility, but we were forced to use EVGA's instead.



As you can see from the Battlefield 3 results, this 10% overclock resulted in an increased minimum FPS of one, an increased average FPS of three and an increased maximum FPS of one. Admittedly, these results are not necessarily very astonishing since we are only dealing with a 10% overclock, but a 3FPS improvement is quite considerable when you take into account the maximum and minimum barely increased. It is quite clear that overclocking this GPU does not result in linear performance increases.

Value


Taking into account the included software and accessories and the fact that this card comes pre-overclocked as well as has additional overclocking headroom, we are pretty happy to say that this card does provide quite a bit of value. If you are looking for a card that can essentially play all games at fairly reasonable settings and at a fairly reasonable price, this card may just be it. Currently, the Zotac GTX 560 Ti OC sells on newegg for $209 after a $20 mail-in rebate. Prior to rebate, it sells for $229 which is okay when you consider the HD 6950 goes for about $225 after a similar mail-in rebate.

Based on these findings, the Zotac GTX 560 Ti OC isn't necessarily a crazy good deal, but at the same time it does deliver a reasonable level of performance. With AMD releasing the 7950, the prices of the 6950s have dropped quite a bit and we expect the GTX 560's to do the same very soon.

Conclusion

The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti OC is not the best performing card out of the cards that we tested, but it definitely gave us a pretty reasonable level of performance. There are a lot of cards on the way right now, so there's a very good chance that the price of the GTX 560 Ti may actually drop even further in order to clear stock. So, if the performance level of the GTX 560 Ti satisfies you and $200 isn't too rich for your gaming blood, we'd definitely recommend taking a look at this graphics card.

This card should pretty much satisfy any gamer's desire to play any game with NVIDIA's up to date drivers which have resolved any issues that may have existed with any games. We had considerable issues playing Skyrim with our 6950 and as a result had to drop the benchmark entirely. Such issues we simply did not encounter.