Gigabyte GV-N560SO-1GI-950

Gigabyte's GTX 560 portfolio consists of seven graphics cards. The model on test here known as the GV-N560SO-1GI comes from the company's ‘Super Overclock Series' and so ships pre-overclocked.

Like most of the cards on trial here the GV-N560SO-1GI-950 features a custom cooler rather than a standard Nvidia reference cooler. The core and memory are covered by a reasonably large aluminium heatsink and sitting on top of this are two large but slim (in terms of depth) cooling fans.

Running the card through our benchmarks we found the cooling solution worked well though it was slightly noisier than the cooling system Asus has used on its cards in this round-up.

Using GPU-Z to dig into the card's internals we found that Gigabyte has clocked this card's core up to a potent 950MHz. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory has also been fiddled with and runs at a frequency of 4,580MHz. Impressive.

Thanks to the higher frequencies the Gigabyte performed well in our tests. In our Heaven v2.0 test the card managed 74.5fps, 50.3fps and 43.2fps. Since all of these figures are well above the 30fps safe mark, we noticed no jerkiness or stuttering at all.
Comparing these results to those produced by the $103 less expensive Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Multiview (reviewed on page 33), the Gigabyte is the faster card overall.