Gigabyte & MSI GeForce GTX 560 Launch Review - PAGE 4

To overclock the GTX 560 graphics cards, we used the latest GPU overclocking utilities released by Gigabyte and MSI. For stability testing, we used the Unigine heaven 2.1 benchmark with the highest in-game settings, and only considered the clocks stable if it could run the benchmark in its entirety and without errors.

Gigabyte GTX 560 Overclocking:

When overclocking the GTX 560 we were able to increase the GPU clock speed to 955MHz, which gave it a total shader clock speed of 1910MHz. This is an increase of nearly 20%, so we expect to see excellent scaling at these speeds. The memory was also able to be increased substantially was well, and in our testing we were able to reach a stable speed of  1165Mhz (4.5Gb/sec effective).

MSI NGTX560 Overclocking:

The MSI NGTX560 was able to overclock higher than the Gigabyte model for the simple reason that we were able to increase the voltage level of the MSI graphics card when using the Afterburner utility. This allowed up to push the GPU clock speed nearly 25% higher than the 810MHz clock speed of the reference models. This gave us a final clock rating of 1010MHz, which also increases the Shader clock to 2020MHz. This is an excellent overclock and it should net us some nice performance increases across the board. The memory on the other hand overclocked to the same level as the Gigabyte model, as the NGTX560 was able to reach a stable memory frequency of 1160MHz before we started to notice errors.