ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition (+SLI) Review

Overclocked to the maximum, the ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! looks to be the perfect buy. Join us as we put the mid-range GPU throughout it paces.

Product on Review: ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition
Manufacturer and Sponsor: ZOTAC
Street Price: £166.88

Established in 2006, ZOTAC are relative newcomers to the graphics card market yet they have rapidly become a favourite among gaming enthusiasts. You don’t get that kind of repertoire in such a short space of time by churning out inferior products. Quality craftsmanship, excellent product support, a superior warranty service and ultra-reliability are the order of the day here. Oh, and if you like to have the best performance straight out of the box without having to tweak until daybreak, then ZOTAC have that base covered too!

The AMP! Editions of ZOTAC graphics cards feature maximum possible overclocks yet still retain air cooling. The only options further up the hierarchy are Infinity Editions but for this you will need water-cooling. The GTX560AMP! Editions do however require modifying from stock format to keep the overclocks under control and for this purpose ZOTAC use their own custom heatsink and cooling fan assembly.

This particular model should not be confused with GTX560’s that carry the Ti moniker as the standard GTX560 GF114 core has a reduced shader count of 336 CUDA stream processes as opposed to the 384 carried by the GTX560Ti. The Titanium based GTX560’s have been dropped by NVIDIA and instead we are left with the stripped down GTX560. Interestingly though, NVIDIA have not produced a reference design and have left the graphics card manufacturers to set the clockspeeds of the GPU and memory to whatever they see fit, giving them free reign to produce pre-overclocked editions which will allow them to differentiate themselves from other varieties of the GTX560.

The ZOTAC GTX560 AMP! Edition is one such graphics card that arrives pre overclocked, weighing in at 950/4400MHz making it among the fastest factory overclocked GTX560’s available. This speed is faster than we managed to manually overclock the previous GTX560 reviewed here so it’s certainly impressed me straight away to have a factory overclock faster than what was possible manually overclocking the same core design. It does however remain to be seen how this overclock fairs and indeed how much harder the cooling has to be worked.

My single reservation is that with only 1GB of GDDR5 we could see some serious VRAM limitations at high resolutions which is something I will be looking into while testing the cards. Also, because the cards are priced at around the £160 mark, they are cheap enough for those looking for a ‘bang-per-buck’ solution to SLI so with this in mind, I will also be running a pair of overclocked GTX560’s in SLI to see how they compare to the high end single core GPU solutions.

A bit about ZOTAC

ZOTAC International is one of the largest producers of NVIDIA VGA and motherboard solutions worldwide.

ZOTAC International (MCO) Limited was established in 2006 with a mission to deliver superb, high quality NVIDIA graphic solutions to the industry. It has strong backing from its parent group, PC Partner Ltd. – with headquarters in Hong Kong, factories in mainland China and regional sales offices in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The scale of support ZOTAC provides is currently unrivalled in the world. With 40 surface mount technology (SMT) manufacturing lines, 6,000 workers and a production facility with over 9,000,000 square feet, ZOTAC employs a full array of state-of-the-art technologies and skilled personnel in order to meet your hardware needs. In addition, ZOTAC has over 130 research & development professionals in Hong Kong and mainland China, working to bring you the best from the cutting edge of the industry. ZOTAC’s international bases of operation work together to enable effective and efficient global as well as localized sales and marketing support.

ZOTAC doesn’t just mean top tier quality, it is also synonymous with high performance, absolute reliability and unparalleled value. With a range of products featuring overclocked performance, excellent cooling properties, and unique packaging ZOTAC products routinely meet – and exceed – users’ expectations.

ZOTAC’s unwavering commitment to our users is to bring the latest products quickly to the market with the best value. Needless to say ZOTAC is the right choice for those who demand the highest quality graphics solutions.

For more about ZOTAC’s philosophy, click here…

Specification

The GF104 chip was originally designed from the ground up to target the mainstream market and it came in the form of the GTX460 in two SKUs sporting different framebuffers. However, it was still based on the same Fermi architecture as its bigger brother, the GF100 and following in its footstep it came with one functional unit disabled. The GTX560 gets the same treatment the GTX580 cards have received and features an updated/tweaked version of the GF104 chip. This has come in the aptly named GF114 GPU. As with the GF104 GPU, the GPU features a total of 384 CUDA cores but on the former, it was always limited to 336 Cores as found on the GTX460. Improvements in power leakage and reduction in power consumption meant that in the GF114 guise, all the cores were functional and as such the GTX560ti had 8 functional Stream Multiprocessors (SM). To target the mainstream, Nvidia have decided to provide a cut down version of the GF114 GPU with only 7 of the SMs enabled for a total of 336 CUDA cores. This places the GTX560 non ‘ti’ perfectly between the old GTX460 and the more recently released GTX560ti. The card boasts the benefits of the updated GF114 GPU with performance to outmatch the GTX460 thanks to its clock speed.

The GF114 GPU still boasts the same transistor count of 1.95 billion and uses the same 40nm manufacturing process. The latter highlights the fact that Nvidia have engineered the chip to be more efficient on a more mature process without resorting to a small manufacturing process. Architecturally, the layout of the core has remained unchanged. Each of the 8 SMs has a polymorph engine and every 4 SM shares a raster engine. Unlike the GF110 core, each SM has 48 CUDA cores instead of 32 and each has 8 texture units rather than 4. The implication of this is that each SM of the new core has more compute and texture power than the original GF100/110 GPU. The result is a core organised in an 8×48 block to give a total of 384 CUDA cores. Additionally, there’s the L1 Cache for each SM and a common L2 Cache shared the by the core’s 8 SMs. One disabled block on the GTX560 means that the total number of cores has reduced to 336 and the number of texture units is down to 56, matching the GTX460.

GF110: 16 SMs x 32 = 512 Cores, 16 SMs x 4 = 64 texture units
GF114 (GTX560ti): 8 SMs x 48 = 384 Cores, 8 SMs x 8 = 64 texture units
GF114 (GTX560): 7 SMs x 48 = 336 Cores, 7 SMs x 8 = 56 texture units

The memory subsystem is also intact. The core has 4 memory controllers for a 256-bit memory interface. The GTX560 makes full use of them for 1024MB of on-board memory. To compensate for the narrower memory bus, Nvidia have teamed the core with GDDR5 memory for much higher bandwidth that could previously be achieved using the same bus width.

GTX580: 32-bit channel x 12 = 384-bit interface, 256MB x 6 memory controllers = 1536MB memory

GTX560: 32-bit channel x 8 = 256-bit interface, 256MB x 4 memory controllers = 1024MB memory

Other benefits that have made their way onto the GTX560 are less leaky transistors and as a result, much higher default clock speeds. Whereas the GTX460 came clocked at 675/3600MHz, the GTX560 is clocked at 810/4000MHz. The result is a card that is substantially more powerful than its predecessor with a 10W drop in TDP.

The card we have today is an overclocked edition from Gigabyte, the GV-N56GOC-1GI. As such, it has a factory overclock preset on the card to boost its GPU core to 830 MHz. Shaders too are overclocked to run at 1660MHz while the memory remains at a stock speed of 4008MHz. While these are by no means huge overclocks, they are nonetheless a welcome addition to the cards armoury. The GTX560 stock settings are 810MHz on the core along with 1620 for the shaders and 4008MHz for the memory.

So as you can see, the CUDA processors are the same as the GTX460, some 48 less than the GTX560 Ti but the overclocked card we have has a faster clocked GF114 core, faster shaders and faster memory, albeit slight. The good news doesn’t stop there though as the power draw of the GTX560 is 20w less than the Ti version which should equal a cooler, quieter card, especially as this version has a custom designed cooler. Not that there is a reference cooler you understand, or indeed a reference card as all GTX560’s are custom. NVIDIA you see, gave their partners free reign on setting the clockspeeds of both the GPU and the memory and as there was no reference cooling design to work from, other than those shipped with the GTX460, the manufacturing partners have designed their own. This can only mean good news for the consumer though as a customer cooler is more often that not, quieter and more efficent than that of a stock, reference design.

ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition specifications

• Model
Model ZT-50702-10M

• Interface
PCI Express 2.0 x16 (Compatible with 1.1)

• Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer NVIDIA®
GPU GeForce® GTX 560
Core clock 950 MHz
Stream Processors 336
Shader Clock 1900 MHz

• Memory
Memory Clock 4400 MHz
Memory Size 1 GB
Memory Interface 256-bit
Memory Type GDDR5

• 3D API
DirectX DirectX 11
OpenGL OpenGL 4.1

• Ports
DVI 2 (DVI-I)
HDMI 1 (mini-HDMI)
DisplayPort NA
VGA (With included DVI-to-VGA adapter)

• General
RAMDAC 400 MHz
Max Resolution 2560 x 1600
RoHS Compliant Yes
SLI Supported Yes
Cooler With fan (dual-slot)
Dual-Link DVI Supported Yes
Windows 7 Capability Certified for Windows® 7 with DirectCompute support

Let’s take a look at the features…

Features

NVIDIA GeForce GTX500 series is the world’s fastest DirectX 11 GPU. With screaming performance and an innovative new thermal design, GeForce GTX500 series rips through the latest games while running quieter than the previous generation.

3D Graphics

•Full Microsoft® DirectX® 11 Shader Model 5.0 support: o NVIDIA PolyMorph Engine with distributed HW tessellation engines
•BC6H and BC7 texture compression formats
•Gather4 extensions
•OpenGL 4.1 support
•Advanced image quality features: o 32× coverage sample antialiasing
•Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling
•16× angle independent anisotropic filtering
•128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with antialiasing; 32-bit per-component floating point texture filtering and blending
•Interactive ray tracing support
•Full-speed frame buffer blending
•Full-speed FP16 texture filtering
•Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and zdata
•Support for normal map compression
•Adaptive z-cull
•Early-Z

GPU Computing

•NVIDIA CUDA™ technology—allows the GPU cores to provide performance improvements for applications such as video transcoding, gaming, ray tracing, and physics. API support includes: o CUDA C
•CUDA C++
•DirectCompute 5.0
•OpenCL
•Java, Python, and Fortran
•Third Generation Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) o 32 CUDA cores per SM
•Dual Warp Scheduler simultaneously schedules and dispatches instructions from two independent warps
•64 KB of RAM with a configurable partitioning of shared memory and L1 cache
•Second Generation Parallel Thread Execution ISA o Unified Address Space with Full C++ Support
•Optimized for OpenCL and DirectCompute
•Full IEEE 754-2008 32-bit and 64-bit precision
•Full 32-bit integer path with 64-bit extensions
•Memory access instructions to support transition to 64-bit addressing
•Improved Performance through Predication
•Improved Memory Subsystem o NVIDIA Parallel DataCacheTM hierarchy with Configurable L1 and Unified L2 Caches
•Greatly improved atomic memory operation performance
•NVIDIA GigaThreadTM Engine o 10x faster application context switching
•Concurrent kernel execution
•Out of order thread block execution

Nvidia Technology

•NVIDIA SLI® technology—patented hardware and software technology allows up to two/four NVIDIA GeForce GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance and enhance image quality on today’s top games.
•NVIDIA PhysX™ technology—allows advanced physics effects to be simulated and rendered on the GPU.
•NVIDIA 3D Vision™ Ready— GeForce GPU support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, bringing a fully immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC.
•NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround™ Ready—scale games across 3 panels by leveraging the power of multiple GPUs in an NVIDIA SLI configuration. Combine with 3D Vision technology for the ultimate 3 panel stereoscopic 3D gaming experience.

Advanced Display Functionality

•Two pipelines for dual independent display
•Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560×1600
•Dual integrated 400 MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048×1536 at 85 Hz
•HDMI 1.4a support including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D support, x.v.Color, HDMI Deep Color, and 7.1 digital surround sound. See www.nvidia.com/3dtv for more details.
•DisplayPort 1.1a support
•HDCP support up to 2560×1600 resolution on all digital outputs
•10-bit internal display processing, including support for 10-bit scan out
•Underscan/overscan compensation and hardware scaling

Video

• NVIDIA® Pure Video® HD technology with VP4 programmable video processor
•Decode acceleration for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile, H.264, MVC, VC1, DivX (version 3.11 and later), and Flash (10.1 and later)
•Blu-ray dual-stream hardware acceleration (supporting HD picture-in-picture playback)
•Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing
•Noise reduction
•Edge enhancement
•Bad edit correction
•Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
•High-quality scaling
•Motion Compensation
•Video color correction
•Dynamic contrast enhancement and color stretch

Digital Audio

•Support for the following audio modes: o Dolby Digital (AC3), DTS 5.1, Multi-channel (7.1) LPCM, Dolby Digital Plus (DD+), MPEG2/MPEG4 AAC
•Data rates of 44.1 KHz, 48 KHz, 88.2 KHz, 96 KHz, 176 KHz, and 192 KHz
•Word sizes of 16bit, 20bit, and 24bit

Let’s move on to assess the products packaging and contents…

Packaging & Contents

Box Front

The front of the packaging is very busy indeed. A fire spewing dragon dominates proceedings which perhaps in hindsight is not the most apt creature to portray a cool running card. Nevertheless, it does match the overall colour scheme of ZOTAC and the glossy, orange and black packaging does look very striking. The software bundle is listed to the right while the main feature set and headlining specifications are to be found at the bottom end of the box. As you can see from the sticker on the left, our sample came with a free copy of Assassins Creed Brotherhood (download code) which is great to see as even cards that cost triple this have been lacking a free game, especially one with such quality.

Box Rear

The rear of the box goes to great lengths to promote ZOTAC’s ‘Turbocharged gaming experience’. I do applaud ZOTAC for not using generic spiel on their packaging though as there is plenty of mention of GTX560 AMP! Edition rather than text which could describe any number of GPU releases.

Right Side

To the right side of the box we find a short run down of the products specifications along with an NVIDIA feature list supported at the bottom by the ZOTAC product tag.

Left Side

The left side of the box goes on to portray further NVIDIA technologies with the minimum system requirements found below. The main aspect you should consider is that you will need a spare, full size PCIe port and a PSU rated at 450w (or higher) which is capable of supplying 24A on the 12v rail. Interestingly, ZOTAC say that this card needs a minimum of 2GB system ram but I would wage the card would run quite happily, if somewhat restricted, on a system with less ram.

Box Open

Upon opening the box we are greeted with a plethora of accessories for such a small package. I was however slightly concerned with the manner in which the contents were packaged as although the accessory tray was separated from the main GPU unit, the GPU itself had no further protection other than the cardboard box. Unfortunately there was no foam cradle as with most GPUs to hold it in place. So while the overall box is very sturdy, I have reservations regarding the protection it affords to the contents.

Accessories

Lastly, we arrive at the contents which are very complete and more than enough to get your shiny new graphics card up and running. Along with the driver/utility disc you get a copy of Assassins Creed Brotherhood, 2x twin molex-6pin power cables, a VGA to DVI adapter, a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter and three product manuals.

Overall a well presented product backed up by a good contents list. It does however lose marks for the poor protection granted to the GPU.

Let’s take a look at the card itself…

Closer Look Pt.1

Card Front

The card looks fantastic. The orange and black colour scheme of the cooler works extremely well together. The fans are an translucent yet bright orange which are framed by a contrasting gloss black frame. Both the fans and frame are made from thin plastic which may break if handled incorrectly yet the card still feels heavy. I would have preferred to have an aluminium frame instead of plastic as I do feel over time, the flimsy frame could break if you change hardware often.

Card Rear

The matt black power circuit board adds to the overall aesthetics of the card with the continuing black/orange theme. The card measures just 23cm long which is great news for those who are limited on space. Sadly, the card is still dual slot but this is the same of all GF114 core GPUs.

Card Perspective

Overall the card is that of a supermodel. Demur yet striking, fragile yet empowering. This card is potentially one of the best looking designs we have seen this year which is sadly let down by the plastic frame. Were it to have a brushed, black aluminium frame, the card would simply look perfect but alas, mid-range cards have to keep costs under control so it is easy to see where cuts have been made here.

I/O backplate

The I/O area is a standard affair but yet again, ZOTAC have paid attention to the visuals by colour coding the DVI ports and have used a gun metal grey shield. Excellent! To the left of the two DVI ports (which support up to 2560×1600) we see an mini HDMI port. Above the ports is the main vent of the card. I do however wonder at the usefulness of this as with the card being an open cooler design, hot air will still escape into the case which is sadly the Achilles heel of such an attractive design.

PCIe Power Ports

Despite having a TDP of 150w, the card still requires 2x6pin PCIe power ports. ZOTAC advise a minimum 450w power supply unit which is capable of providing 24A on the 12v rail. The ports are positioned on the end of the card which is the best position for a card of this size as there should still be space between the power ports and hard drives which cannot always be said for larger graphics cards. This helps keep cables tidy and out of sight.

SLI Tabs

The ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition is SLI capable but sadly only two can be used together due to the lack of twin SLI tabs. We will be putting SLI to the test by pairing this card to another GTX560 with a view to analysing how it scales compared to high end, single video graphics adapters.

Overview

Overall, the card is very well designed throughout. I cannot praise ZOTAC enough for the gorgeous colour scheme which will make this card stand out from the crowd. They have obviously gone to great lengths to make the card as visually appealing as possible and to that point I believe they have succeeded as this card is without a doubt, the best looking GTX560 we have seen. NVIDIA gave their partners artistic license through not having a reference cooler of their own to produce bespoke GPU coolers so while we are yet to analyse the performance of the cooler, on looks alone it is winning already.

Looks can however be deceiving so I think it’s time we removed the cooler and take a look at the card in greater depth…

Closer Look Pt.2

Cooler Removed

Here we see the belly of the HSF assembly. Three copper heatpipes stretch from the baseplate out from a thick aluminium heatsink to the more traditional thin finned array.

Cooler Frame

The frame is attached to the heatsink via four small screws and despite the frame being thin, it is actually less fragile than I originally thought. The two fans are attached via a traditional tri-spoke design. Sadly, there was no sign of LED lighting.

Cooler Fans

The fans themselves are not what I would call innovative as the eleven blades on each fan feature no additional curves to increase turbulence or indeed to abate noise. They are also very thin, measuring under 10mm which may be an indication of high speed/high noise. We will investigate this later in the review.

Main Heatsink

The heatsink is split into two separate designs, the main unity being a thick finned design, close to the core of the GPU. This is an interesting design as it is not common at all to have thick finned heatsinks so it remains to be seen how this performs.

Heatpipe Contact

The heatpipes stretch away from the thick finned heatpipe and are soldered to the thinner finned array. Rather than the solder being manually applied, it appears that the heatpipes have been dipped to get a better, equalised contact.

Heatsink baseplate

Unlike most designs, ZOTAC have employed a full copper baseplate which is also moderately polished. A quick test using graph paper showed that the plate was flat and as you can see from the picture above, shiny. This should ensure a very good contact with the GPU.

Naked GTX560

The card itself looks very sparse with relatively few solder points. In a traditional design, the core is framed by the memory chips with power circuitry towards the PCIe power ports.

Power Circuitry

Here we can see the MOSFETs of the ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! from Korean manufacturer MagnaChip. Surprisingly, these are not actively cooled despite the higher than stock voltages used to power the core. All round solid capacitors are also used which will keep overclocks under control and will certainly lengthen the lifespan of the graphics card.

GDDR5 Memory

The memory chips used on this particular graphics card are Samsung K4G10325FE-HC04 which are rated to run at 1250MHz (5000MHz effective). I was surprised ZOTAC didn’t opt for the increased bandwidth available from Hynix chips that are now common place among AMD cards, especially as this would have given some further overclocking headroom. We’ll see if this is a limiting factor when we come to overclock the card.

Heatsink Contact

Above you can see the contact the core of the GPU has with the heatsink. We found this to be one of the best contacts we have seen yet on a GPU. The application of paste was within the ‘Goldilocks’ zone (not too much, not too little) with a very even spread. The quality of the paste was thick yet easy to remove and as you can see above, the coverage was nigh on perfect.

Let’s move on to the Test Setup we will be using for todays review…

Test Setup

We have recently made a slight amendment to our selection of hardware and our test setup. The reason for this is that we felt the current crop of resolutions were not stressing the latest generation of graphics cards enough. With this in mind, we have added a Dell 3007 WFP-HC to our system, allowing us to stress the cards by utilising a 2560×1600 resolution. We will however, still include 1920×1200 results as this is one of the most popular resolutions used by gamers.

Display – Dell 3007 WFP-HC
Case – Lian Li PC-P80
CPU Cooler – Prolimatech Super Mega (2xProlimatech 140mm Vortex)
CPU – Intel Core i7 920 @ 4GHz
RAM – 6GB (3x2GB) OCZ Blade DDR3 1600mhz 7-8-7-20 C1
Motherboard – ASUS Rampage III Extreme
Power Supply – Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W
Hard Drive – GSkill Falcon 128GB & Hitachi 250GB

Graphics Cards:

ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! Edition 950/4200MHz – Forceware 275.33
SLI NVIDIA GTX560 1GB 950/4200MHz – Forceware 275.33

HIS HD6970 2GB IceQ Mix@ 880/5500MHz – ATI Catalyst 11.5
Lucid HydraLogix = HIS HD6970 2GB IceQ Mix & MSI nGTX580 3072MB Lightning Xtreme Edition @ Factory clockspeeds
MSI nGTX580 3072MB Lightning Xtreme Edition @832/4200MHz & 975/4400MHz Overclocked – Forceware 275.33
ASUS HD6990 @830/5000MHz & AWSUM enabled (pre-overclocked) 880/5500MHz & Further Overclock of 930/6000MHz – ATI Catalyst 11.5
HIS HD6970 2048MB IceQ Turbo @ 900/5600MHz Pre-overclocked & 1000/6000MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.5
Gigabyte GTX560 1024MB @ 830/4008MHz & 841/5016MHz Overclocked – Forceware 275.27
MSI R6970 2048MB Lightning @ 940/5500MHz Pre-overclocked & 1010/6000MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.4 (8.840.3.0)
Inno3D GTX560Ti 1024MB @ 820/4008MHz & 950/4300MHz Pre-overclocked –Forceware 266.66
Inno3D GTX570 1280MB @ 732/3800MHz, 800/4000MHz Pre-overclocked & 901/4220MHz Overclocked – Forceware 263.09
ASUS GTX580 1536MB @ 782/4000MHz & 903/4220MHz Overclocked – Forceware 262.99
ASUS HD6970 2048MB @ 890/5500MHz & 949/5896MHz Overclocked – ATI Catalyst 11.4 (8.840.3.0)

Driver versions are extremely important when comparing a graphics card. It is however often important to update a driver version, especially when a new GPU is released and thus any change in driver will be clearly stated.

Overclocking
For today’s review we will use the Afterburner utility from the MSI to overclock the test subject.

Games:
Crysis Warhead
Metro 2033
Dirt 3
Mafia II
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Far Cry 2
Alien vs. Predator

The games above represent equal bias toward both AMD and NVidia and are among the most demanding games available at present. Future releases will be evaluated for consistency and accuracy and then potentially added to the list when they become available

Synthetic benchmarks:
Futuremark 3DMark 11
Unigine Heaven 2.5
Tessmark 0.2.2
Furmark 1.9.0

Synthetic benchmarks are used to stress each feature of a GPU which may not be present in today’s games. While nothing is certain, the benchmarks above do at least give us an insight into the possible future performance of the graphics card on test, invaluable when evaluating the potential lifespan of a graphics card.

Temperature, power consumption and acoustics:
Furmark 1.9.0

The above application is feared by most manufacturers as it has been known to destroy GPU’s. While it is not indicative of ‘real world’ performance, it does represent the maximum possible stress your GPU could be placed under making it the hardest test to pass. For that reason alone, it is worthy of inclusion in our suite of benchmarks. Power consumption will be evaluated from the wall and will be a total system draw of the specification above.

Sound will be measured from a distance of 20 cm from the actual GPU with the case open. All system fans will be set to their lowest settings. Readings will be taken at both idle and 100% load.

Software Bundle

The ZOTAC driver and utilities disc comes with a number of free software and trials. A few of them are GeForce-accelerated, taking full advantage of Nvidia’s CUDA. Here’s a description of the applications included.

Enhance

Easily stabilise, brighten, and sharpen your high-definition videos using powerful enhancement technology with vReveal. Harnessing the power of NVIDIA CUDA technology and ZOTAC GeForce series graphics cards, vReveal processes videos up to 5x faster than with a CPU.

Edit

Edit your home videos with extreme precision and stunning effects with Nero Vision Xtra. Advanced features such as picture-in-picture effects, multi-track timeline, full key frame control and master effect track lets anyone transform home videos into cinematic masterpieces easily with Nero Vision Xtra.

Note that this is the trial version only.

Experience

Experience online photos and videos like never before with Cooliris, a revolutionary browser plug-in. Cooliris transforms your web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome) into the ultimate media browser that scrolls through infinite amounts of photos and videos in a matter of seconds with the option to view the content instantly.

Entertain

Transform your PC into a digital entertainment hub with the open-source and award winning XBMC media centre. Enjoying digital audio, video and image content with XBMC media centre is a breeze, whether the content is on physical media such as CDs, flash drives, memory cards, or stored on another system over the network, XBMC media centre can access and play it with ease.

Enjoy

Enjoy web browsing on your high-definition television set with the big-screen optimised Kylo web browser. Kylo is the ultimate TV web browser with big fonts and big buttons for easy usability while relaxing on the sofa.

ZOTAC FireStorm is the brand’s take on the already populated world of overclocking utilities. Nonetheless, it is still a good touch for those unfamiliar with other applications such as MSI Afterburner.

The utility is fairly simplistic in design and functionality providing three sliders for basic clock speed adjustments and fan control. Nonetheless, it works as promised but those wanting a higher degree of customisation should look at MSI’s Afterburner application instead.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood

It’s great to see that ZOTAC have also included a free copy of Assassins Creed Brotherhood which is presented as a redeemable coupon and allows the game to be downloaded from UBISOFT. I am the first to criticise manufacturers when they include cheap, out of date games and inflate the price of the product. More so, I find it frustrating when manufacturers don’t include any game at all, especially on mid/high range cards. While some may argue adding a game will only increase the cost, I would retort that manufacturers will not be paying full retail price for a game, especially if it is in digital format so this should be taken advantage of but only if it enhances the overall package. Including a poor quality game does nothing to make the overall package attractive and indeed it can actually hinder the appeal, especially if the products price is inflated.

ZOTAC however have struck a very good balance by including a popular, new game while managing to keep costs under control so if the package was not attractive enough already, it certainly is now!

Let’s move on to the product testing section of the review…

Overclocking & Temperature Analysis

Overclocking

As you can see above, the stock card weighs in at a heavyweight, ultra overclocked 950MHz on the core and 1100(4400MHz effective) on the memory. This is attained with a high VCC of 1.14v. Unusually for NVIDIA, they have not stipulated a reference clockspeed so ZOTAC have pushed the envelope and clocked the graphics card extremely high. Unfortunately, ZOTACs own Firestorm utility do not allow voltage increases so I opted to use the Afterburner tool from MSI to see if I could eek any more performance from an already highly overclocked graphics card.

Sadly, it appears that ZOTAC had pretty much maxxed out the card meaning I was left with very little adjustment left to overclock the card myself. I did however manage to grab a further 50MHz on the core and 100 MHZ(effective) on the memory but that was as far the card would allow me to push things before I started to encounter instability, despite the voltage slider being increased to it’s maximum level. While I may be painting this as poor performance it really isn’t all bad as this type of card is produced for those who do not want the hassle of tweaking settings further, rather it is set to go ‘as is’ with an already blisteringly fast overclock preloaded into the ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP!s BIOS.

Temperature

To measure the temperature of the card we first measure the ambient temperature. Our review station resides in an air conditioned room with the temperature set to a comfortable 23c.

When idle the card ran at a very cool 33c, just a slight increase over the lower clocked GIGABYTE GTX560 we reviewed previously. Placing the card under load however changed matters somewhat as surprisingly, the card ran quite hot, hitting a maximum 82c, some 30c higher than the GIGABYTE card. While the temperatures are still within safe limits and below the 90c throttling point of the GF114, I do have some concerns as during hot summer months, the card may, under certain high stress conditions begin to throttle. Out of interest I set the fan to run at 100% which did reduce temperatures a little (2c) but nothing to write home about. So while the card is overclocked and has perfect TIM application, it appears it is perhaps not as efficient as the GIGABYTE example in wicking heat away from the core.

Disappointingly, it’s also not the quietest of examples as we will see overleaf…

Accoustics & Power Consumption

Acoustics

Often overlooked when purchasing a graphics card is the noise that it emits. We all hear (no pun intended) of graphics cards that run like a jet engine which can have a detrimental effect on a gaming session, regardless of the FPS it churns out. It is therefore extremely important that a graphics card should operate as quietly as possible.

To test for this we will be using a sound meter and microphone setup which will be placed 20cm away from the GPU. The test will take place in a quiet (not sound proof) room with the results for the GPU fan at low (30%) and highest (100%) settings.

Results

I could not distinguish the graphics card fans from the system fans which were set to their lowest setting. The system reached a peak of 53dB during the 5 minute test which is a good result. With the coolers fans set to maximum it was however, much more noticeable and intrusive when gaming. While far from the loudest cooler on test it was disappointing considering the effort that had been put into the aesthetic. Sadly, it appears form has taken president over factor on this occasion.

Power Consumption

For this test, we will be using a wall meter with the test setup plugged in minus the Monitor. Readings were taken at both stock and overclocked conditions each having readings also taken in idle and 100% load (Furmark).

Results

FurMark is perhaps not indicative of a true gaming environment and indeed is not recommended by NVIDIA or AMD to test stability of a card but in my view, much like Prime95 for CPU’s, it puts the graphics card under the highest possible stress and presents a good ‘worst case’ scenario. So while it is unlikely your card will ever be stressed as much under normal conditions, it is a good indicator of a theoretical maximum.

In our tests, the card consumed almost as much power as a GTX580 due to the huge overclocks and increased voltage. At idle however the card was only second to the GIGABYTE GTX560, drawing just 197W (full system) from the wall. While out test system is also heavily overclocked and a high power setup, the load consumption still fell short of 450W so a PSU of this size would still be adequate, just. The GTX560 SLI configuration as expected, consumed much more power increasing the power required by just under 140W.

Let’s see if all that power equates to increased benchmarks scores…

Crysis Warhead

Following the success of Crysis, the stand alone expansion “Warhead” was hotly anticipated to bring more game play, more weapons, improved visuals whilst maintaining better performance, the latter being what gamers wanted most. After all how many people upgraded their rigs just to play this game… In the game, you play as the upbeat Brit Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes, chasing down a Korean nuclear warhead. Throw in some ice shooting aliens and we’re bound to have a great game. It sure delivered.

Testing was done using Framebuffer’s Crysis Warhead benchmarking tool. The tests were configured to DirectX 10 at Enthusiast levels. Each test on the Ambush map was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Far Cry 2

One of the most hyped games of 2008, Far Cry 2 had some big shoes to fill. It was built to be the next best thing since well… Far Cry I suppose. Combining an open-world game play with highly detailed graphics, physics and AI, what more could we possibly want? The game puts us in the body of a malaria inflicted mercenary hunting down the “Jackal” in the heart of Africa, in a bid to stop an on-going conflict between two rival factions. The storyline can be hard to follow sometimes but I’m no game reviewer, so let’s concentrate on the graphics and performance. After all, we all need to know if our hardware will be able to handle the scorching savannah burning at the hands of our flamethrowers.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Far Cry 2, configuring the settings to Ultra and DX10. The small ranch level was chosen and each configuration was looped three times from which the average FPS was recorded.

Metro 2033

Based on the novel by the same name, Metro 2033 is a first person shooter with elements of survival horror. As Artyom, you trawl through the mutant infested metro systems of post-apocalyptic Moscow. The game delivers presents a grim ambience that reflects on the overall atmosphere of the underground setting. Metro 2033 uses the setting as a back drop to showcase some of the best visuals of any games out now, making it the ideal benchmark for those looking for the best graphics card.

The bundled benchmarking tool was used on Metro 2033, configuring the settings to Very High and making use of DirectX 11. The frontline scene was looped 3 times for each configuration. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

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Alien Vs. Predator

Spawned from the popular Alien and Predator franchises, Rebellion have collaborated to bring the legendary war to us through the medium of a first-person shooter. The game forces you to hunt, prey and most importantly survive in the swamp colony of Freya’s prospect as a Predator, Alien or Marine. The stunning visuals add to the sense of dread and terror that we have become so accustomed to seeing with the series.

The stand-alone Alien VS Predator benchmark tool was used for testing here. All the settings were set to very high and Tessellation was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Battlefield Bad Company 2 is the new rendition of the widely successful Battlefield series of game. Having more in common with the console release of Bad Company, the sequel hopes to inject the DNA of the timeless Battlefield 2 online experience with the witty action packed single player shooting adventure of the original. As Private Preston Marlowe, your goal as a member of Bad Company is to once again save the world by securing a scalar weapon device.

Fraps was used to test performance. Each test was conducted at the start of the ‘Cold War’ level ensuring that the same actions and paths were taken during the 2 minute sample. All settings were set to the highest available in game with AF set to 16x and HBAO turned on. The average FPS was recorded by FRAPS at the end of each walk through.

DiRT 3

As players race to elevate their global standing, DiRT 3 is back delivering mud, sweat and gears world over: from the intense weather-beaten rally stages of Europe, Africa and the US, to executing performance driving showcases and career challenges where car control is pushed to spectacular limits.

The in-game benchmarking tool was used to test performance. All the display settings were set to the maximum available and DirectX 11 was applied. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

Mafia II

Following the success of Mafia back in 2002, the third person action adventure game is back with a new grittier and darker world. As Vito Scaletta, an aspiring made man, your job is to work through the twist and turns of Mafia lifestyle. The more blood spilt, the more you get in return but the lifestyle was never meant to be an ideal one. Set in the visually stunning Empire City, the wartime references provide the ever present back drop to a rife period in America’s history, in which potential for exploitation becomes Vito’s key focus.

The in-game benchmarking tool was used to test performance. All the display settings were set to the maximum available in-game. PhsyX was only enabled if specified in the charts. The average FPS was recorded at the end.

TessMark 0.2.2

TessMark 0.2.2 is an OpenGL benchmark and tech demo that uses the new hardware tessellation (or GPU tessellation) features exposed by the OpenGL 4 API. Hardware tessellation makes it possible to divide a polygon into smaller ones (according to the tessellation level factor) in order to increase polygons density: the higher the tessellation level, the higher the polygon density. A high tessellation level requires much GPU processing power.

TessMark was run in fullscreen, benchmark mode using map set 1 and configured to use OpenGL 4.

3DMark 2011 & Unigine Heaven 2.5

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world’s most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

Unigine Heaven 2.5

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Conclusion

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride testing this card. To begin with I’d like to talk about the product package as this, like the rest of the card has both its good points and not perhaps not so good.

The packaging of the card, while attractive is perhaps not the most protective. The lack of support for the graphics card may mean the card does not arrive to you in pristine condition. With the lack of any substantive brace, there is more graphics card movement that I would like inside the box. We are all well aware there are some couriers who like to use our shiny hardware packages as make shift footballs so it’s imperative ZOTAC up their game with regards to the protective element of their packaging. The box contents are very good however and it’s great to see a mid-range card having a game included. For that ZOTAC are to be applauded.

Should the card arrive in one piece, you will certainly not be disappointed in either its looks or performance. Aesthetically, the card is perhaps one of the best looking mid-range cards available. The black and orange theme is carried throughout the cards design to great effect, even to the point of including colour coding DVI ports. It’s attention to the smaller details that separate cards such as this from the crowd and with manufacturers having free reign over their own GTX560 design, competition is high to make their product shine. ZOTAC have certainly succeeded to this end.

I was slightly disappointed at the cooling performance of the card as I expected it to perform much better than it did owing to the custom cooler and twin fan setup. Sadly, heat dissipation was mediocre when the card was placed under load so while the card may look very cool, it was anything but. Add to this the whining fans trying to keep that heat under control and the whole product suddenly becomes a little less appealing.

Performance wise, the card performed very well as you would expect from the massive factory overclocks. The caveat to this though is that because the overclocks are so high to begin with, there was little left in the tank to increase those clockspeeds further. I also found that the Samsung memory used was much more stubborn than the Hynix modules found on other cards. While it is mildly overclocked already, it could not attain the same clockspeeds as the memory in our previous reviews. The card is not pitched as an overclockers dream though and the average user who wants performance straight out of the box will not be disappointed with this product as ZOTAC have done all the hard work for you by overclocking the card pretty much to its maximum on your behalf, saving you lots of time and effort. There were some oddities with the results of the ZOTAC GTX560 when compared to the GIGABYTE card, especially with the way they handled tesselation. While the cards use different memory types (and likely sub-timings) I doubt this would explain the dramatic difference in FPS. I belive this difference is most likely as a result of using beta drivers for the GIGABYTE card and the latest drivers for the ZOTAC cards. Sadly driver update clashes and reviews are unavoidable as we believe in giving you up-todate performance where possible. It seems the new NVIDIA drivers handle tesselation much better than the older driver set but occassionally at the cost of FPS in some games.

Priced at around the £167 mark, it is less the £20 more expensive that a stock GTX560. The cost of the included game would be more than this so when you factor in this card is also pre-overclocked it presents itself as quite a bargain. It is also easy to imagine enthusiasts taking advantage of this by pairing two together instead of buying a single, high end card costing well over £300. To that end we also evaluated the SLI performance and for the most part, we were impressed by the improvements two of these pre-overclocked mid-range cards made. Scaling was very good, especially at lower resolutions as it kept pace, occasionally beating the cream of single core high end GPU’s that cost substantially more.

The one potential problem I see with this card is the measly 1GB of GDDR5. With high resolution setups rapidly becoming the norm (1920×1080 is now the most common according to Steam), GPU memory size will become much more important than it has in the past, especially if you like applying the gloss to a game. At 2560×1600, the card began to struggle somewhat and when AA was applied, this only served to make matters worse. While the games were still playable (Metro 2033 excepted), it was clear the lack of VRAM was having an effect on the card by bottle necking the GPU performance. It is however, unlikely that you will pair a 30″ screen and a mid-range graphics card so perhaps it is a little unfair of me to mark the card down too much due to the lack of VRAM as this aside, the card performed extremely well at lower resolutions throughout our suite of benchmarks.

So to round up, the card looks superb, performs great (at lower resolutions) and is priced competitively. Were it to have an additional GB of GDDR5 this card should be put on every budget conscious gamers ‘buy now’ list. Also the cards cooler, while looking great is perhaps not the most efficient at either heat dissipation or noise abatement. Because of this, I cannot justify giving the card one of our top awards on this occasion. If you can live with the noise though and don’t intend on gaming at massive resolutions with all the trimmings applied, I can see no reason not to recommend the ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! and for this reason it puts claim to our Bronze Award.