EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win Pro Reviews

EVGA includes a three-year limited warranty on the GTX 560 Ti 2Win, with optional five- and 10-year extended plans available for $30 and $60, respectively. The company offers 24/7 toll-free support in addition to Web/e-mail support. When we initially tested this card, AMD hadn’t yet released its new Radeon HD 7950 and HD 7970 cards. At that time, the GTX 560 Ti 2Win was an easy pick in the $500 price range. Now, though, AMD’s new cards bookend it on both price and performance, and offer the simplicity of single-GPU design and the possibility of increasing performance by adding additional cards in a CrossFireX configuration.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win proved to be a front runner in the performance benchmarks, but you'll be paying more than what a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti cards cost to run in SLI and have a shorter warranty.

The only aspect I feel that EVGA has left underdeveloped on an otherwise very strong card is VRAM. As a result of SLI 2Win is a $520 card with 1GB of effective VRAM. We’ve already seen 1GB of VRAM pose limitations in a couple of our tests, and going forward it’s only going to get worse. Case in point: Battlefield 3, which we’re currently looking at. In a technical presentation DICE has stated that the combined memory consumption at 1920x1080 for the gbuffer, Z-buffer, and MSAA resolve data is 158MB; and this is before other buffers let alone textures. As a $200 card meant for 1920 and lower resolution, 1GB of VRAM makes sense for the GTX 560 Ti. But as a $500 dual-GPU card meant for higher performance, higher quality, and higher resolutions, 1GB of effective VRAM is the biggest bottleneck going forward for the 2Win. Realistically EVGA is in a hard place since using higher density GDDR5 would drive up the price of the card and make it even more expensive than the GTX 580, but at the end of the day I think the 2Win needs 2GB of effective VRAM to spread its wings through 2012.

The EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win card is another unique addition to the graphics card market thanks to the clever and risk-taking people at EVGA. At PC Perspective we are always fans of products that push the status quo forward - we hate stagnation and that is something the graphics market has seemed for the past 6 months or so. Even better, EVGA didn't create a product that only a thousand people will get or that costs $1500; instead the $520 dual-GTX 560 Ti card actually appears to be reasonably priced and offers advantages over current competition solutions in the same price segments. It isn't all roses as any time you move from one GPU to a pair of them for your game rendering it introduces some additional potential headache, but for the most part I came away completely impressed with a card competing in performance with the GTX 590 at about $200 lower cost. See, it really is a win.

By taking a risk on a custom dual GPU graphics card, EVGA has swung for the fences with the GTX 560 Ti 2Win. In our eyes their gamble has mostly paid off since the 2Win offers up excellent performance results while minimizing some of the concerns normally associated with multi card configurations. Adding to this card’s appeal is the lack of competition since most AMD and NVIDIA board partners are simply unwilling to take a chance on such a niche product.