At stock, the card is near silent when idling with temperatures rising to just 10c above ambient. Most impressive was when the card was put under immense stress; the noise did not increase while the temperatures remained at an acceptable 55c. Intrigued by the performance of the cooler, I set it to run at 100% using MSI’s Afterburner overclocking tool and I was surprised at just how quiet it was. While it was slightly more noticeable than at the stock setting (50%), it was nevertheless still near silent with only a faint drone being emitted.
Stock
To test for overclocked settings, we used a combination of MSI’s Kombuster programme and multiple runs of the Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark. Here’s what we achieved with today’s sample:
Overclocked
With the Gigabyte card being a pre-overclocked edition, we did not expect any great shakes from the card. Although the factory overclocks are the card are slight, as we saw with the Ti version, factory overclocked cards are often already near their limit. With this in mind, we began our testing with some minor overclocks, testing for stability along the way until we reached artefacts. We then backed down until the card became stable under Kombuster, a programme which severely stresses a GPU.
I am pleased to report that our sample reached a very good 941MHz on the core, some 111Mhz over the factory overclock and 131 MHz over stock editions. The most astounding aspect of the card though was the GDDR5 Hynix memory. Bearing in mind this memory has no direct cooling, it reached an astronomical 5016MHz, an amazing feat for a mid-range GPU!
The Gigabyte GTX560 already comes with a slight overclock but further overclocking it results in substantial gains in performance as shown by a 25% increase in memory bandwidth reflecting the memory overclock. On the core, the overclock represents a 13% boost over the standard Gigabyte clock which in itself is a 2.4% increase over reference clocks. This allows it to match the GTX560Ti easily on paper.
Temperature
Overclocking however means very little for 24/7 usage if it means you have to live in an igloo and listen to something that resembles and jet aircraft preparing for take-off to compensate for that extra speed, this is where the Windforce cooler comes into its own.
Temperatures at both stock and overclocked were very good, reaching a maximum 64c when put under maximum load. Better still this was done with only the faintest drone from the twin 10cm fans, testament to Gigabytes innovative cooling solution.
