Review-Palit GeForce GTX 560 Sonic Platinum: NVIDIA’s New “Sweet-Spot” Graphics Card

GF114 “junior”, Specification

Compared to the “original” GF114 on the GTX 560 Ti, the “junior” GF114 on the GTX 560 is a bit lacking in that it is only equipped with 336 CUDA Cores (Stream Processor), 56 Texture Units, and 32 ROPs. That makes is nearly identical to the GF104 on the GTX 460, except for the operating frequency. We wonder if the GTX 560 is actually a pumped-up GTX 460.
To satisfy our curiosity, we put the GTX 460-1GB and the GTX 560 side-by-side in one of our benchmarks. In order to give both cards a level playing field, the GTX 560 had its frequencies lowered to 675 (core) and 3600 MHz (memory) to match that of the GTX 460’s.

Well, seems like both cards are identical when it comes to performance-per-megahertz alone. Still, the GTX 560 comes with substantially higher clock speed by default.

Clockspeed Specification

Speaking of the clockspeed, we were actually a bit confused as to how high the GTX 560 is actually clocked by default. The frequencies listed on the table above is that of the Pre-overclocked Palit Sonic Platinum edition GTX 560. Until now, NVIDIA has not disclosed information regarding GTX 560’s default clock speed. Judging from this, it seems like NVIDIA would simply leave the matter of determining operating frequencies in the hands of their partners.

As you can see in the picture above, each graphics card manufacturer sets a different clockspeed for their GTX 560 products. Chances are, all of the GTX 560 graphics card would have their core and memory clocked at 800 MHz and 4000 MHz, respectively.