Hardware Zotac GeForce GTX 560 1GB Amp! Review

Nvidia's latest GPU slots in between the GTX 560 Ti and GTX 460 1GB.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/05/17/zotac-geforce-gtx-560-1gb-amp-review/1

 

WTF!!!....£180.

Once again Nvidia demonstrates that it really doesnt have a Fxxxxxx clue.....

 

How so? It's priced below the 560ti.

 

if nVidia sets the prices for these, gotta agree w/ Hustler. Power consumption alone will end up sucking the savings back from the consumer.

Still not sure why they even bothered to release this kit. They'll need to drop another 40 quid before this becomes acceptable.

 

I think once the market stabilises, the prices will sort themselves out (namely by the 560 dropping) - hopefully to around the £150 mark. For that, it'd be a good card (stock speeds), and a little premium for OC'd.

 

You can easily pick up a GTX560 Ti (including the Twin Frozr model mentioned in this review) for under £180 (it was recently on offer at overclockers for £164.99 for example).

At £140-160ish the GTX560 makes some sense but at over £180 it is totally pointless. For a tenner more you can get the fully unlockable HD6950 2GB.

The mention of only having 28 ROPS enabled is an interesting one. Anandtech shows the 560 having the full compliment of 32 rops:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4344/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-top-to-bottom-overclock


This makes far more sense as the ROPs are not directly associated with the shader modules. This is most obvious in the GTX460 1GB vs 768mb model. The latter had the same amount of SM's enabled; seven, yet has one memory controller disabled leading to a reduction in both memory bus width and rop count. The rops are clustered in groups of 8 so it would be very odd to have only 4 disabled.

 

As I mentioned in the KFA2 thread, I bought my 560 Ti 3 months ago for roughly the same price that they're charging for the 560. This card is completely pointless until it's driven to the £140-£150 range, where it will start kicking ass.

 

Scan are selling 560 GTX's for 150 pounds already

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...0mhz-shader-1620mhz-336-cores-2-x-dvi-i-mhdmi

There is half a dozen between 148 and 160 pounds.

 

Scan is selling HD6870 and HD5870 cards for around £150 too. The MSI HD6870 1GB HAWK has been sold out for a few days now(was £148 for a few weeks):

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...dr5-gpu-930mhz-1120-streams-plus-free-shogun2

OcUK has the card in stock for aorund £155:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-126-MS&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1866

You can get an XFX HD5870 1GB for around £150 too:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...r5-gpu-850mhz-1600-cores-dp-hdmi-2-x-dl-dvi-i

It seems there is a lot of choice for between £150 to £200 especially since you get decent HD6950 and GTX560TI cards too.

 

Other thing to keep in mind is that Nvidia has given their partners quite a bit of leeway in creating the boards so I think that you're going to see a broad range of boards for this card. The Zotac being one of them, seemingly priced badly. I think that the whole range of 560's (non Ti) are still on my "we shall see" shelf.

Although, I've just purchased a 560 Ti so I wont be shopping for a while. I was just hoping that they wouldn't ruin the fact that I just purchased it by releasing a cheaper card with similar performance. So far as this article is concerned I don't think I made a bad choice.

 

Interestingly there are 2GB 560s available as well - nice for a cheap CAD card.

I've just realised: when we recommend cards to people, we're going to always have to carefully use the Ti suffix now!

 

one thing, Value for money, hopefully this will make the case for a 460 sli system, I can see the 460 hitting £100 shortly (around £60/70 second hand), and 2 460's in sli will pulp this 560, thats why we sli peeps !..

 

also, the 560 tag makes complete sense to me, but im mental and eat haggis, nom nom nom.....

 

No folding figures again! As a generally pro-folding site and magazine, I wish you would include something. How much extra work would it involve?

 

Great, Nvidia is making power hogs even less expensive...

 

how would you measure folding performance ?, from what baseline would you have the techs at bit tech base it on ? run it on a test system and take an average of the ppd over a day ?, not an easy thing to do when you only work 8 hrs a day and got multiple bits of kit to test, plus articles to write, website and magazine to run, my guess its folding performance is slightly behind the 560ti, go eat some haggis and ponder why you flamed em for not doing a folding test......

 

I didn't intend to flame, the folding community has been asking for this to be done for some time, and never get any response. For those of us who care about folding performance, rather than gaming performance, getting actual figures rather than educated guesses is important.

To measure performance all that would be needed is to use the same WU in all reviews, it would not be necessary to either complete it or to return the results to Stanford. Performance can be measured using Fahmon or HFM.NET and only a few frames would need to be run to get a calculated PPD figure. Since modern GPUs can complete a frame in 1-2 minutes, then a coffee break would be long enough and fit neatly into a working day.

 

forgive me if im wrong, but is folding not dependant on network speed as well ?, or is it an offline process ?, you download the frame, then fold ?, it just seems a mighty headache to me to gain any "standard result", just seems odd to me why you would want ppd figures for a 560 when ur community already has figures for a 560ti, a slightly faster card at stock, also, many folders run stripped OS's, so there are very little background programs running, how would you factor that into a test ?, and what about linux ?, just seems a bit of a headache to even try....