Introduction

The Christmas season has officially started and although we might be in the slowest year ever when it comes with new graphics card releases, NVIDIA does have something ready for Q4 2011.

Ever since its release, the GeForce GTX 460 has been a popular product, in Q1 this year it got bumped up with a small GPU revision towards the GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and later on the GTX 560 (without the Ti) was released. With time progressing and with the board partners actively seeking new and refreshing product to add to their lineup, NVIDIA has made a new SKU available -- and they probably needed to clear some GF110 stock ...

Now I deliberately mentioned the GTX 460 in the first chapter as something similar in terms of refresh products is happening today. NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 core. It's a product that will be faster than its predecessor as it has more shader processors, as its a castrated GTX 570 really.

That 448 Shader processor count might ring another bell though, correct ... the GeForce GTX 470 has exactly the same specs in architecture as the product released today, albeit different (faster clocks). Anno 2011, the GTX 570 is the closest family member really. Take a GeForce GTX 570, disable one shader processor cluster and boom that's the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 core -- a product that carries the same clock frequencies as that GTX 570 yet with fourteen shader processors clusters out of the fifteen on the GTX 570. In theory that means that the GTX 560 Ti 448 Core is merely a fifteenth slower than the GTX 570 ...

So make no mistake, the GeForce GTX 560 448 will certainly be a nice speed jump compared to the regular GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Being based off that GeForce GTX 570 means it also comes with a wider memory bus at 320-bit and yeah, more memory as 1280 MB GDDR5 will be placed on these products.

Anyway, we'll talk tech on the next page as this is just the introduction. The product reviewed today comes from Gigabyte. It's their all new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores tagged under SKU codename GV-N560448-13I, which comes stock clocked.

The product will get that new GPU seated onto a custom PCB and will be cooled by that lovely WindForce 3X cooler. Armed with a 210Watt TDP, will the card be a good chunk faster than it's predecessors? Let's find out shall we?