MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Review

RHKCommander959 - November 29, 2011
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Testing:

Testing of the MSI GTX 560 Ti 448 Power Edition will consist of running it and comparison cards through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks. This will test the performance against many popular competitors. Comparisons will be made to cards of equal and greater capabilities to show where they fall on the performance ladder. The games used are some of today's newest and most popular titles to give you an idea of how the cards perform relative to each other.

The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing, with the exception of the 3DMark 11 testing, where PhysX will be disabled in the NVIDIA control panel where applicable. I will test the cards at stock speeds, then overclocked in order to see the effects of any increases in clock speed. The cards are placed in order from highest to lowest performing in the graphs to show where the cards fall by comparison. The drivers used are the 11.7 Catalyst drivers for AMD-based cards and the 275.27 for NVIDIA-based cards.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 200x18 3.6GHz
Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
Memory: Mushkin 998990 12GB 9-10-9-28 1866MHz
Video Card: MSI GTX 560 Ti 448 Power Edition
Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Case: Corsair Graphite Series 600T

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

MSI GTX 560 Ti 448 Power Edition 945/1130

I had great expectations of this card when it came time to overclock. The last card from MSI that I reviewed was similar and did extremely well. Since the core is a GF110 we know roughly what to expect from it and since it was already slightly overclocked I started at 875 MHz core speed. MSI Afterburner v2.2.9 Beta can adjust the core, memory, and auxiliary (PLL) voltages so I cranked the core up to 1.15V from 1.0V, and gave the memory +35mV roughly. For the PLL I didn't give it much since the clock speeds weren't getting too extreme. With 1.15V at the core it would game reliably at 950 MHz core and 1138 memory but would freeze occasionally so I backed both down to 945 MHz core and 1130 memory and achieved stability. It may be possible to unlock the core to a GTX 570 since both cards have the same memory capacity and bus — I was unable to find out if the streaming multiprocessors have been laser cut in time for this review but if they haven't been there is a decent chance for unlocking more power. The card still had more thermal headroom left but the voltage limits in Afterburner wouldn't allow it to go any higher. Reference GTX 560 Ti 448s have a stock core clock of 732 MHz and a memory clock of 950 MHz, the MSI came overclocked to 750 MHz core and 975 MHz memory. In the end we have the core at 945 MHz and the memory at 1130 MHz, both are remarkable gains of ~29% and ~19% over reference speeds!

Maximum Clock Speeds:

Testing for the maximum clock speed consists of looping Crysis Warhead and Unigine 2.5 for 30 minutes each to see where the clock speeds will fail when pushed. If the clock speed adjustment fails, then the clock speeds and tests are re-run until they pass the full one hour of testing.

Gaming Tests: