Tag: NVIDIA

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Roundup: ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte & MSI

A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released the GTX 560 Ti; a graphics card that has proven to be just the right fit for a large cross-section of the current market. AMD did their best to rain on the parade with their own HD 6950 1GB and did succeed to a certain extent even though availability has been a bit spotty and selection is limited. Nonetheless, NVIDIA’s own board partners have forged ahead with a long line of GTX 560 derivatives.

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The GTX 560 Ti follows very much in the GTX 460’s overclocking footsteps since it has the ability to increase both core and memory clock speeds to some incredible levels. This has allowed several companies like EVGA, Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI to release some higher end products which feature increased clock speeds, custom cooling and some excellent software which can be used to push things even further.

For this roundup, we have chosen four of the more popular GTX 560 Ti cards currently on the market: the ASUS DirectCu II TOP, MSI Twin Frozr II OC, Gigabyte Super Overclock and the EVGA Superclocked. Their clock speeds and feature lists run the gamut so by seeing what they offer, we should be able to get a good indication what the GTX 560 market will look like in the coming months.

In previous generations, it wasn’t unusual to see $30 or more tacked onto a GPU’s price simply because it carried a minimal speed increase. Times have changed as the market has become more competitive and every one of the cards featured in this roundup carries no more than a $20 premium over reference-based products while clock speeds get significant bumps. Indeed, the MSI Twin Frozr II OC model features a $249 price; the same cost as a standard GTX 560.

LG Optimus 2X & NVIDIA Tegra 2 Review: The First Dual-Core Smartphone

In many ways, the smartphone platform has evolved following the same kinds of steps we saw in the early days of the PC – lots of different software and hardware platforms, rapidly changing lead players, faster and faster platform update cadence, the slow emergence of obvious majority leaders. Anand and I have talked extensively about just how striking the similarities are between the PC evolution and the current mobile one, but one of the striking differences is just how much faster that evolution is happening in the mobile space. The reason is simple – nearly all the hard lessons have already been learned in the previous PC evolution, it’s just a matter of porting that knowledge to mobile under a different set of constraints.

2011 is going to be a year dominated by multi-core smartphone launches, but there always has to be a first. So just like that, we have our first example of said category of smartphone, the LG Optimus 2X, with Nvidia’s dual-core 1 GHz Tegra 2 AP20H at its heart. The Optimus 2X (simply the 2X henceforth) hasn’t changed much since we saw it at CES – the hardware is aesthetically the same, and software at first glance is the same as well. We weren’t able to publish benchmarks at that time purely because LG hadn’t finalized the software build on that test hardware, but we definitely can do so now.