Although the GTX560Ti from Inno3d appears to be a mere reference design amidst the plethora of custom designed card on the market from the like of Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI, it turns out that Inno3D have applied a substantial pre-overclock to their card. This makes it one of the most powerful GTX560 you can buy. By default, the Nvidia reference card is meant to be clocked at 820/4008MHz. At this speed, the card idles at 1.125V and under load there is no change in voltage. Unlike the GTX570, there is no vdroop at all but the voltage is strangely higher.
The pre-overclock on the Inno3D card stands at 950/4300MHz representing an impressive 16% boost in core clocks and a more conservative 7.5% increase in memory speeds. As with their GTX570, there were minor stability issues at the default voltage when looping Crysis Warhead. Since I deemed that unstable, the voltage had to be increased slightly and in the end, 1.137V proved enough. The GPU used the same voltage under both load and idle. It would have been better if Inno3D had ensured stability themselves to avoid potential buyers from scratching their heads should they run into problems. Unfortunately, it was impossible to raise the clocks further so it seems Inno3D overclocked their card to its limit.
The 16% pre-overclock on the core translates to the same gains pixel fill rate, texture fill rate and shader operations. Similarly, the memory bandwidth increased linearly with the memory clock speed. For a pre-overclock, the specifications make the card even more appealing and the most impressive aspect is that it manages to outperform even the GTX570 on paper. The only feature lacking is the sheer memory bandwidth of its bigger brothers but for a mid-range card, it’s nothing to sneer at.
In real world performance, the overclock results in an overall 12% performance advantage over a stock reference card. Despite the lack of further headroom, it represents a higher overclock than achieved on some other cards such as the HD6950 or Hd6970 previously tested. Kudos to Inno3D in that regard.
Temperatures & Noise
The Inno3D GTX560Ti isn’t the coolest of card operating at 65C delta under load when reverted back to its reference clocks. And when set to its pre-overclocked speeds, it operated with a delta of 64C. The results are still superior to that of its predecessor, the GTX460, and the card runs slightly cooler than its competition from AMD. The reason for the warm running card is the fan profile. At idle, the fan operated at 40% at both clock speeds, remaining quiet. The fan stays inaudible even after being cranked up to 49%. Under load, the fan speed increased to 60% where it became somewhat audible but producing more of a gentle humming noise. Again, this was the fan speed at both clock settings. It wasn’t until the fan was turned up to 70% that it became audible. On the positive side, it wasn’t intrusive. It appears that the 75mm fan and the heatsink is a very efficient design. The somewhat hot idle temperatures can be attributed to the card not clocking down to 2D speeds due to the fact that two monitors were connected to it.
