NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti: Upsetting The $250 Market
by Ryan Smith on January 25, 2011 9:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
Wrapping things up, for the last week now I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time going over two thoughts: 1) What do I make of the GTX 560 Ti, and 2) What do I make of the name? The latter may sound silly, but I’m almost positive it’s the more important question. After all, why would NVIDIA resurrect the Ti suffix after an 8 year absence?
The answer I believe is a matter of momentum. There was a reason we called the GTX 460 the $200 King at its introduction: it was an aggressively priced card that shifted the market overnight, delivering a very high quality midrange card to a market that AMD failed to hit during their reign as the king. With a number of very quick price drops following its launch, it quickly became the $200 card of choice until AMD could fire back with the Radeon HD 6800 series. I would not classify it as the kind of legendary card that NVIDIA’s Ti 4200 became, but it had a good shot at it.
NVIDIA is now faced with a question of how they should follow-up on the GTX 460 only 6 months later. It would be difficult to recreate the GTX 460’s launch at this time – the market doesn’t have any gaping holes and NVIDIA does not have a brand-new chip. But NVIDIA wants to recreate July of 2010 anyhow – and with any luck April of 2002 while they’re at it. And that is why we have Ti.
To get a 30% performance improvement out of what’s fundamentally the same GPU is quite an accomplishment. I do not believe NVIDIA was originally intending for it to be this way (rather they’d launch something like the 560 back in July of 2010), but the result is nevertheless remarkable. Since the launch of the GTX 460 NVIDIA’s launches have been mostly solid, and the GTX 560 Ti adds to that list. Price/performance is not quite as aggressive as the GTX 460, but NVIDIA is still being aggressive enough to reshape the market – why else are we seeing Radeon HD 6800s for so cheap, and the very sudden launch of the 1GB Radeon HD 6950?
So what do I make of the GTX 560 Ti? There’s the question I haven’t quite answered. It seems like the video cards that go down in history as being truly great are aggressively priced cards the competition has no immediate answer for. I firmly believe that NVIDIA deserves most of the credit for the recent shakeup in video card pricing between $200 and $300 due to the launch of the GTX 560 Ti. But credit is not the same as a solid recommendation.
AMD’s scramble to launch the Radeon HD 6950 1GB has produced a card with similar levels of performance and pricing as the GTX 560 Ti, making it impossible to just blindly recommend the GTX 560 Ti. With sufficient case cooling both the GTX 560 and the Radeon HD 6950 1GB are good cards for the price, and represent a meaningful step up from where we were just 2 weeks ago. Ultimately I think the situation is very similar to December’s launch of the 6900 series, and the match-up between the GTX 570 and the Radeon HD 6970: we have two very similar cards in almost all respects. The GTX 560 Ti ultimately has the edge: it’s a bit faster and it’s quieter than the 6950, and if that’s all you care about then there’s the answer you seek. But you could grab the 6950 1GB and you’d be doing no worse. The deciding factor seems to come down to just how much to value noise and cooling (560) versus power consumption (6950), what games you play, and whether you’re currently invested in the NVIDIA (CUDA, 3D Vision) or AMD (Eyefinity) ecosystem.
In the long run I suspect pricing pressures will make things clearer. Based on what we’ve seen with the GTX 460, NVIDIA clearly has more pricing latitude than AMD with products in this range and with GPUs between 300mm2 and 400mm2. A stalemate is only 1 price drop away from being a clear victory for NVIDIA, so it may simply come down to just how badly NVIDIA wants to win.
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Nimiz99 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
One of my buddies has a C2D 8500 system OC'd to 3.5 i think. He got himself a 5870 (overclocked) to game. The problem we ran into was that the C2D is too slow to handle games like Civ5 that heavily rely on the CPU to keep up (you can still play the game, but it's literally wasting the 5870 with noticeable lag from the chip). Basically, he is upgrading now to a sandy bridge. I'd wager some of the older i7's or maybe even a Thuban (OC'd to 3.8 with a good HT overclock) could manage, but why bother when a new architecture is out form Intel (or AMD later in the year).So enjoy your new build ;),
Nimiz
Beenthere - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Over the last couple years Nvidia has really struggled and they may be on the ropes at this point. They have created a lot of their own problems with their arrogance so we'll see how it all plays out.kilkennycat - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
eVGA GTX560 Ti "Superclocked" Core: 900MHz, Shader 1800MHZ; Memory 4212MHz $279.99~ 10% factory-overclock for $20 extra, together with a lifetime warranty (if you register within 30 days) ain't too shabby....
Belard - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Sure, the name shouldn't be a big deal... but each year or worse, Nvidia comes up with a new marketing product name that is meaningless and confusing.Here is the full product name:
GeForce GTX 560 Ti But in reality, the only part that is needed or makes ANY sense is:
GeForce 560
GTX / GT / GTs are worthless. Unless there were GTX 560, GTS 560 and GT 560. Much like the older 8800 series.
TI is only added to this idiotic mess. Might as well Ultra, Pro or MX.... so perhaps Nvidia will come out with the "GT 520 mx"?
The product itself is solid, why turn it into something stupid with your marketing department?
AMD does it right (mostly), the "Radeaon 6870" that's it. DUH.
omelet - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Yeah. Not that it really matters. And while this might be what you meant by "mostly" note that AMD's naming was pretty retarded this generation with the 68xx having lower performance than 58xx.But I don't see why they readopted the Ti moniker.
Sufo - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
no, that's only a result of the 5xxx series being stupidly named. Using 5970 for a dual chip part was the error. Use an x2 suffix or smthng. AMD is back on track with the 6xxx naming convention... well, until we see what they do with the 6 series dual chip card.Belard - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
The model numbers of:x600, x800, etc have been consistent since the 3000 series.
x800 is top
x700 is high-end mid range ($200 sub)
x600 is mid-range ($150 sub)
x400~500 low-end ($50~60)
x200~300 Desktop or HTPC cards.
AMD said they changed because they didn't want to confuse people with the 5750/5770 cards with the 6000 series. Which is completely stupid... so instead they confuse everyone with all th cards.
If the 6800s were called 6700s - they would have been easily faster than any of the 5700s and at least somewhat equal to the 5800s (sometimes slower, others faster). Instead, we have "6850" that is slower than the 5850.
The prices are a bit high still, yet far cheaper than the 5800 series, in which a 5850 was $300+ or $400 for the 5870. But by all means, I'd rather spend $220 on a 6870 than $370 on todays 5870s.
Anyways, I'm still using a 4670 in my main computer. When I do my next upgrade, I'll spend about $200 at the most and want at least 6870 level of performance, which is still about 4x faster than what I have now. Noise & heat are very high on my list, my 4670 was $15 extra for the better noise & heat cooling system. Perhaps in 6 months, the AMD 7000 or GeForce 700 series will be out.
marraco - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
Is the first time I see a radiator geometrically aligned to the direction of air velocity thrown by the fan.Obviously it increases the efficiency of the fan, increasing the flow of air thrown across the radiator, and reducing noise.
It’s an obvious enhancement in air cooling, that I don’t understand why CPU coolers don’t use.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - link
I wouldn't be surprised if in some cases the increase in fin surface area (from having a bunch of straight fins packed more closely together) produces better cooling than having a cleaner airpath.MeanBruce - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 - link
You should check out the four Asus Direct CU II three slot radiators that came out today on the GTX 580, 570, and the HD 6970 and 6950, each using two 100mm fans, five heatpipes and three slots of pure metal, they claim you can easily fit two of them on ATX for SLI and CB?