Palit GeForce GTX 560 Ti Sonic Pro Reviews

Elsewhere, the two custom-designed cards from ASUS and Palit are commendable efforts from both companies. It’s impossible to separate the two based on raw performance, but overall, the ASUS card has a slight advantage because of its much more efficient cooler. That said, the Palit card isn’t too shabby, considering it managed to maintain operating temperatures at a reasonable level, in spite of its boosted clock speeds. As for pricing, the Palit GeForce GTX 560 Ti Sonic will command a US$10 premium over reference cards, bringing its price to US$259, which we think is quite good value for money considering the performance it offers. And although ASUS couldn't provide us with global pricing at the time of publish, we can expect it to cost a US$10 to US$20 premium over reference cards too.

For just a little more than the price of the vanilla GTX 560 Ti the Palit Sonic edition represents good value and excellent performance. That said for another tenner you can pick up a Radeon HD 6950 that's ripe for a good ol' flashing.

Talking about the Palit GTX 560 Ti Sonic on its own, we're dealing with another good version of the series. Palit like everyone has come out hard and fast and it's great to see that they've opted for the 900MHz core. It's just nice to get away from the 800MHz mark. The cooler seems to do a good job and considering we tested in SLI the numbers the cooler gives us are still very impressive; more impressive than what we're seeing out of the HD 6900 series which are indeed a warmer card than people had hoped. They're not as bad as the GTX 400 series, but not quite the AMD we've grown used to in the last few generations.

With three retail NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti offerings behind us, we know that picking one is going to be a difficult choice for some. Some users will really want the highest out-of-the-box overclocked settings and that would be where the Palit Sonic offering falls. Others will want the coolest running card and the MSI Twin Frozr II design definitely takes the win there. Galaxy's card offers some great temperatures as well as a unique "spin" on the fan design with a fold-out feature that allows for easy cleaning. All three cards are overclocking competitively with each other in our testing so if you are able to use some tweaking software you'll likely be able to put all three of these cards on an equal playing field. MSI and Galaxy also take the edge in pricing - a $20 gap can be pretty tempting when it comes to graphics cards in the price range.

Overall, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti has emerged a champion for this segment. It's striking the price performance sweet-spot well, giving you performance to play anything at any resolution. Highly recommended.