GeForce GTX 560

The GeForce GTX 560 with suffix nVidia Ti introduced in late January and was an originalprice of 239 euros directly against AMD's Radeon HD 6870 is positioned. That was in January and in the meantime a lot has changed in an attempt last year fought well positionedin the market for individual cards is not to lose is the price of AMD graphics cards in recentmonths dramatically reduced. While the Radeon HD 6870 to launch a price tag well over € 200 had already buy these cards for around 180 euros and the cheapest online stores evensometimes less than 150 euros.


True that price range of around 180 euro nVidia card at this moment. The GeForce GTX560 Ti is on average just over 200 euros, while the GTX 550 cards on average around 135euros.

ASUS Matrix GTX 580 P

The ASUS card is really a monster Matrix: thanks to the giant cooler, the card slots, threespace. The cooler consists of two large aluminum heat sinks, with two or three heatpipes tothe base plate over the GPU connected. As we will see shows the cooler with defaultsettings as silent as the MSI Lightning. The cooling capacity is less clear, however, as we shall see.

The GeForce GTX 580 GPU on this card with 1.5 GB of memory, like the reference card.That's a shame in itself because the Zotac card offers 3 GB and the new version of the MSILightning has a double amount of memory.

Like MSI, ASUS has the PCB of the card completely redesigned so the Matrix-card featuresthat provide standard GTX 580's are missing. It starts with the connectors for video cards:We found two times DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. Close to the monitor connections is a SafeMode button you can press once you optimistic about clock setting is done, so your card willnot work. In Safe Mode run the card with a secure backup BIOS clock speeds.

Radeon HD 6990

The HD 6990 has two Cayman-GPU's, each with 1536 stream processors, which are 830MHz default clocked. Each GPU is using a 256bit memory bus, 2GB GDDR5 memory address, which has a clock speed of 5000MHz. The presence of two GPUs, the graphics 375W of energy. To meet them, two PCI-e connectors, each with eight pins are present, each accounting for 150W. The PCI-e slot provides 75W to the other.

For all this to keep cool, a single radial fan in the middle of the video card installed, the cool air from the enclosure on both GPU's blows. Half of the airflow is blown out of the closet, while the other half just in the closet behind. Tests at Anandtech show that the card can be very hot and then too far from quiet, but this was while using Furmark, which causes higher fuel consumption than even the toughest games.