14 DAY TRIAL // Gigabyte's SOC line of graphic cards has always managed to impress us with its great factory overclocks, but the company has surely managed to outdone itself when it designed the GTX 560 Ti SOC as this is the first GPU to ship with a 1GHz core clock.
Just like all the other SOC cards that were released before it, the GTX 560 Super Overclock Edition uses a custom PCB and a specially designed cooling assembly that uses two inclined PWM controlled fans in order to keep the temperatures and noise levels in check.
In addition, the whole card is covered by a massive heatsink, four copper heatpipes driving the heat away from the GF114 core, enabling it to be 16% cooler than Nvidia's reference design.
As mentioned earlier, the PCB has also been modified, Gigabyte deciding to go with a 6+1 phase power design (six phases go to the GPU and one to the memory), higher quality components, and a proadlizer capacitor which stabilizes the power sent to the GPU.
All these improvements allowed for the core to be clocked at 1GHz, 21% higher than that of a standard GTX 560 Ti, the memory chips running at 4580MHz, 580MHz more than Nvidia's reference clock.
According to Gigabyte, the frequencies achieved raise the cards performance to the levels reached by the GTX 570, even surpassing it by about 3% in some instances.
The GF114 core, which the Gigabyte GTX 560 SOC is based on, features 384 stream processors, 64 texturing units, 32 ROPs as well as a 256-bit wide memory bus that connects the 1GB of video buffer to the GPU, and is built using TSMC's 40nm fabrication process.
Gigabyte's GTX 560 Ti SOC is available right now from various on-line and brick and mortar retailers, its price being set at $269.