MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition Pro Reviews

The MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition/OC is a very decent grahics card for the money. It offers £30 saving on the GTX 570, and performance drop from that card is slight. As a limited edition product, it’s likely to leave an altogether too brief impression on the graphics card landscape.

If NVIDIA set out to fill a vacuum between the standard GeForce GTX 560 Ti and GeForce GTX 570, it more than achieved it with the new GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores. Cards based on this new SKU are priced somewhere in between the price-points of the two, but the performance measured shows it's tilting precariously close to the GTX 570. And why shouldn't it? The new GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores has everything the GTX 570 has - GF110 GPU, 1280 MB of memory over a 320 bit GDDR5 memory interface, 40 ROPs, and even the same reference clock speeds. It's just that the GTX 570 has about 7% more CUDA cores. Is this all sounding too good to be true? Well, here's the catch. First, the GTX 560 Ti 448 cores is a "Limited Edition" product, meaning that limited quantities of it will be produced. We think North American and European markets should digest all cards made in this winter shopping season alone. Next, it's a "Limited Availability" product, meaning that it will be available only in select North American and European markets. MSI's GTX 560 Ti 448 Twin Frozr III offers great performance for all the latest titles thanks to its close relationship with the GTX 570 and the overclock out of the box. The TwinFrozr III cooling solution works well and enables the highest additional overclock out of the cards tested today. Only fan noise under load seems a bit excessive, other boards do much better here. The GTX 560 Ti 448 cores has slightly higher power draw compared to the standard GTX 560 Ti, it's based the larger GF110 silicon, though its performance per Watt warrants it. MSI's implementation is solid, thanks to uncompromising power delivery circuitry, and good cooling.

The MSI GTX 560 Ti 448 Power Edition is an astounding graphics card that provided extreme performance for less money. The cooling is top of the line and its idle power consumption was the lowest out of both groups — even overclocked it used less power idling than the stock competitors! The MSI Afterburner software is extremely handy and makes it incredibly easy to push this card to its potential. The GF110 core supports 3-way SLI so there is no reason to complain about SLI limitations. The fans operate very quietly unless they are set to full speed and even then are nothing compared to the sound of a blower motor. The box is a nice clean design and the card is well protected inside. Overclocking the GTX 560 Ti was very enjoyable with a 29% gain over reference core clocks and a 19% gain over reference memory clock speeds and the temperatures were still well within the safe range The only real con that could be mentioned and is mostly nitpicking is that a lot of the heat generated is vented back into the case. This isn't really a big problem especially if the case has good airflow but this is worth noting. The MSI GTX 560 Ti Power Edition managed to keep up with and beat a GTX 570 in most of the testing while costing far less and still managing to have top notch temperatures, performance, power consumption at idle, and overclocking capability!