ASUS ENGTX560 Ti DCII/2DI/1GD5 Pro Reviews

When receiving the ASUS GTX 560 Ti 2GB we knew it was already about to be replaced but we still feel it needs its day in the sun as the card simply works, and offers something that the original design had omitted, which is the large framebuffer to play games really well in HD resolutions. Obviously with Kepler now released everyone is forgetting about the “value card that was” but we do think that many will continue to use the 560 cards like this because they worked well at a decent value. The issue we saw with this card was possibly just the fan profile as on our open testbench for initial testing it did seem like the fan ramped up pretty fast. This kept the GPU nice and cool but did cause it to be a little louder than e found necessary. Some custom fan profiling and within minutes GPU tweak had the card running just the way we wanted with our own custom fan profile.

The ASUS ENGTX560 Ti DirectXU II Top edition video card proved itself to be faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX560 Ti reference design in our testing, but that was expected since it operates at a 900MHz versus the standard 823MHz clock speeds. We also found that it ran cooler at full load and was able to overclock better than the reference design thanks to the voltage adjustment feature (VoltageTweak) in the SmartDoctor utility. Being able to reach 1GHz on the GeForce GTX 560 when overclocking was nice, but we wish the SmartDoctor would have allowed us to push the card a bit farther. Our only gripe was that we were limited here with the ASUS software, but who can complain that much when you are seeing 1GHz core speeds!

The build quality of the ENGTX560 Ti DCII TOP was quite good. Everything is assembled well, everything fit when I put it back together, and the overall impression of the card was very solid. The cooler along with the PCB and small heatsinks certainly adds a heft to the card and also lends a good deal of rigidity to the package. The packaging was of the highest quality and very informative. The upgraded power supply arrangement with super-alloy-power components give a good impression, and the not-so-crowded design at the back of the PCB means ASUS has been working in the PCB design lately. Even at overclocked conditions the GPU felt very solid, and it never stumbled or complained once.

ASUS' GeForce GTX 560 Ti Direct CU II comes with the company's latest and greatest cooling solution Direct CU II. It delivers low temperatures, but the fan control table does not seem to be optimized for noise reduction. In idle, the card becomes quite noisy - more than other cards in this performance segment and more than NVIDIA's reference design. The overclock out of the box is solid and helps the card gain about 7% over the NVIDIA reference board.