GTX 560 SE pictured and benchmarked

As we reported earlier in February Nvidia has planned the release of the GTX 560 SE to provide competition against AMD’s HD 7770. The card will probablt launch alongside the GTX 670Ti video card which is due out within a few weeks. The launch was scheduled for late February but its now looking more like early March as we know Nvidia are having 28nm production problems. The pictured and benchmarked GTX 560 SE is a card by one of Nvidia’s partners Galaxy.

In terms of the specifications and aesthetics of the card, it is a compact, cost-effective graphics card based on the new 40 nm GF114 GPU variant with model name GF114-200-KB-A1. The GTX 560 SE features 288 CUDA cores, 48 TMUs, 24 ROPs, and a 192-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 1 GB of GDDR5 memory.

Galaxy’s card uses a short PCB, its VRM area has been pushed to the front of the card, consisting of a 4+1 phase design. It draws power from two 6-pin power connectors. The card is cooled by a compact aluminum-fin heatsink to which heat is conveyed by copper heat pipes, and ventilated by a big (80 mm) fan.

The performance of the card isn’t at all surprising. Slotting in between the GTX 550Ti and GTX 560 (non-Ti version). This card is competing against the HD 7770 which scores around 13500 points in the GPU score of 3D Mark Vantage and around 3500 in 3D Mark 11 so we can see the GTX 560 SE is slightly below this (by around 10%). Therefore the card should be priced significantly cheaper, as much as 25% cheaper given the fact it is slower and of the ‘old’ generation of 40nm video cards.

Power consumption figures are pretty good, the GTX 560 SE falls below both the GTX 560 and the slower GTX 550Ti card, offering decent performance per watt for a 40nm card. Although when the overclocking kicks in the power consumption probably soars. However, a ‘comparable’ Sandy Bridge based system with a HD 7770 instead of a GTX 560SE will consume about 20% less power for 10% more performance. If Nvidia want this card to be successful we think they should be looking at both the HD 7770 and HD 6850 as competitors. Consequently a price tag of $130 sounds realistic as the HD 6850 costs $140 and the HD 7770 costs $160. The overclocking capabilities of the GTX 560 SE are good as well, overclocking can take the card almost to performance levels of the GTX 560 but obviously power consumption will rise significantly and overclocking headroom will vary between cards.

Source: QK123