Review-Palit GeForce GTX 560 Sonic Platinum: NVIDIA’s New “Sweet-Spot” Graphics Card

The mainstream graphics card market has always been one of the most interesting segments for us consumers. Here’s where we found graphics cards occupying the so-called “sweet-spot price point” of US$ 200, which usually offer a nice balance between price and performance. A new NVIDIA card has recently found its way into this category: the GeForce GTX 560 (without the “Ti” suffix). Is it as interesting an alternative as the name might suggest?

The GTX 560 is targeted at gamers who are looking for a reasonably-priced graphics card that offers high-enough performance to run games at 1920×1080 with 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled. At least that’s what we can infer from the advertisement pictured above. NVIDIA has also prepared a new driver for the GTX 560 in anticipation for the coming PhysX-enabled games.
There is no direct competitor from AMD to contend the GTX 560 in its US$-200 price point. The closest adversary from AMD’s side is the Radeon HD 6870, which is currently selling for as low as US$ 219 (online price). One possible scenario is that the overclocked versions of GTX 560 will go head-to-head against the HD 6870, but that remains to be seen.
Our first GeForce GTX 560 sample came from Palit in the form of a GTX 560 Sonic Platinum graphics card. Before moving on to the benchmarks, let’s take a closer look at the “GF114” junior on the GTX 560.

NVIDIA GTX 560

The “GF114 Junior”

As mentioned above, the GeForce GTX 560 (without the “Ti” suffix) is based on the GF114 GPU. This particular GPU is an improved version of the older GF104 chip used on GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards. NVIDIA applied a number of optimizations on the GF114, giving it a better performance/ watt ration compared to the GF104. As the result, GF114 is able to run at higher frequencies while maintaining a lower power consumption.

The GF114 was first used on the GTX 560 Ti. Don’t be mistaken though, while both the GTX 560 Ti and GTX 560 share a similar chip, there is a key difference that sets the former apart from the latter. Look at the picture above for a comparison between the GF114 GPU on the GTX 560 Ti and the “junior” (cut-down) version of it on the non-Ti GTX 560.