GeForce GTX 560 Ti disappointment

[james9120]

Hi guys,
I purchased and swapped out my GeForce GTX 460 v2 for a GTX 560 Ti yesterday, and I'm not really impressed with the results. I do not see much improvement while running 3Dbenchmark11, and it seems I could not overclock the GPU as much as people have bragged about online. Maybe I'm missing something? The drivers are fully updated.
The highest I was able to OC the graphics card was around 940mhz/1850mhz for the core clock and shader clock, and 2250mhz on the memory clock. At one point I had the core clock set to 950mhz, and it crashed quickly. So I dropped it down 1 mhz at a time, and it seemed to just crash slower. I was able to pay BF3 for about 5 minutes at 947mhz before it crashed on me. ( I ran through benchmark fine but it wasn't for that long.)

Any tips would be great.
-Thanks

 

[noidis]

I recently swapped my two 560 Ti's for a 680, and the gains have been marginal. So keep that in perspective, two of those babies are awesome for 1080p gaming.

I now have them in a machine that used to run a GTX 460, and 85% is how high the fan seems to go for me. Though realistically even with a slight overclock it's suspect that you need the fan so high... Especially when your temps don't seem to be benefiting from it.

Run a couple different monitoring programs at the same time, make sure they're all showing the same numbers.

Cause that OC with 75% fan speed shouldn't be near 80C, unless your case is horrid.

 

[james9120]

I recently swapped my two 560 Ti's for a 680, and the gains have been marginal. So keep that in perspective, two of those babies are awesome for 1080p gaming.

I now have them in a machine that used to run a GTX 460, and 85% is how high the fan seems to go for me. Though realistically even with a slight overclock it's suspect that you need the fan so high... Especially when your temps don't seem to be benefiting from it.

Run a couple different monitoring programs at the same time, make sure they're all showing the same numbers.

Cause that OC with 75% fan speed shouldn't be near 80C, unless your case is horrid.

I checked with two programs, the highest I hit was around 80C. After more than an hour of BF3 I hit 82C at the highest OC, and fans at 75% since I can't hit 100% for some reason lol. Maybe it is my case... it is pretty junky, an old school Alienware case.

 

[james9120]

Okay guys, I do not think I have a EVGA... I saw a picture and both the box and GPU do not look like mine. This one looks like mine:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-560ti

Here's a pic from GPU-Z:

 

[noidis]

Wow that's extremely odd. Never seen the subvendor listed as Nvidia(10DE)

But from my minor glancing about the web to discover why the manufacturer isn't listed it sounds like it could be a GPU bios problem.



If your GPU is running hot, how is your CPU doing? Is that OC'd? You wanna try and eliminate all the other possible factors that could be causing this problem. I'd also suggest you finding that box, to at the very least return it and get another one.

The 560 ti is a great card, yours is either just a bad egg, or there's some external factor (Heat seeming likely) making it problematic.

 

[james9120]

Wow that's extremely odd. Never seen the subvendor listed as Nvidia(10DE)

But from my minor glancing about the web to discover why the manufacturer isn't listed it sounds like it could be a GPU bios problem.



If your GPU is running hot, how is your CPU doing? Is that OC'd? You wanna try and eliminate all the other possible factors that could be causing this problem. I'd also suggest you finding that box, to at the very least return it and get another one.

The 560 ti is a great card, yours is either just a bad egg, or there's some external factor (Heat seeming likely) making it problematic.

Yeah I have no idea what brand it is... But I don't think I can return it, bestbuy policies... At the best I think they would just give me another one. But this one is running good, just gets hot on a 975mhz OC. And I can't run the fan higher than 75% -_-. Also my case is kinda crap, Just a front fan in the HDD bay and a rear exhaust fan. The stats on Nvidia's site say the card can run as hot as 99C safely, so I (don't think) 80C is doing damage, but I may be wrong lol.

A little off topic, but is there an easy way to just copy and paste the complete stats of my computer? Like motherboard, CPU, the speeds, RAM, etc.

 

[noidis]

Yeah I have no idea what brand it is... But I don't think I can return it, bestbuy policies... At the best I think they would just give me another one. But this one is running good, just gets hot on a 975mhz OC. And I can't run the fan higher than 75% -_-. Also my case is kinda crap, Just a front fan in the HDD bay and a rear exhaust fan. The stats on Nvidia's site say the card can run as hot as 99C safely, so I (don't think) 80C is doing damage, but I may be wrong lol.

A little off topic, but is there an easy way to just copy and paste the complete stats of my computer? Like motherboard, CPU, the speeds, RAM, etc.

Yeah you're not at the limit, but the fact it's getting that hot is just odd. I mean even in my old case which had sub-par airflow mine was hitting the low 70's after a few hours of testing.



As for the specs being posted easily, yeah. Just use CPU-z Click the validate button, Submit, and it'll take you to a page you can copy-paste the info from.

Also can give you a nice spiffy signature to make it easier when asking help =D

 

[Sunius]

It's called 'reference card', because it's made by NVIDIA. They are by no means bad, just they are rare Don't worry about it!

 

[Mousemonkey]

There were several articles a while back that mentioned Nvidia were going to be selling their branded cards through Best Buy, what you have is an expensive OEM card.

 

[james9120]

Yeah you're not at the limit, but the fact it's getting that hot is just odd. I mean even in my old case which had sub-par airflow mine was hitting the low 70's after a few hours of testing.



As for the specs being posted easily, yeah. Just use CPU-z Click the validate button, Submit, and it'll take you to a page you can copy-paste the info from.

Also can give you a nice spiffy signature to make it easier when asking help =D

Thanks, I'll do that then.

It's called 'reference card', because it's made by NVIDIA. They are by no means bad, just they are rare Don't worry about it!

There were several articles a while back that mentioned Nvidia were going to be selling their branded cards through Best Buy, what you have is an expensive OEM card.

Thanks for clearing that up, I only bought it because I got it $100 off lol. Now, can I pair it with SLI with a 560 from another brand? Which ones are compatible?

 

[Sunius]

Only GTX 560 Ti's are compatible, with 1 GB of RAM. The brand doesn't matter. Also, normal GTX 560s won't work!

 

[james9120]

Only GTX 560 Ti's are compatible, with 1 GB of RAM. The brand doesn't matter. Also, normal GTX 560s won't work!

Thanks, what about models such as the TwinFrozr II w/ 1gb? With those fancy models work, and are they even worth spending the extra $$ on?

 

[Sunius]

They work. If you're planning to overclock both cards, I'd get either Twin Frozr II or Asus DirectCU II because when you have 2 of them, the upper card will get hotter. And if you're planning to overclock them, you'll need the improved cooling.

However, you have to note that both cards must work at same frequency, so if you overclock one, you have to overclock another one too.

 

[james9120]

They work. If you're planning to overclock both cards, I'd get either Twin Frozr II or Asus DirectCU II because when you have 2 of them, the upper card will get hotter. And if you're planning to overclock them, you'll need the improved cooling.

However, you have to note that both cards must work at same frequency, so if you overclock one, you have to overclock another one too.

I'm kinda confused on how to connect them. The instructions say to put the second card in the slot farthest away, but I believe the PCI slot farthest away is only a x8 and not x16 like the other two.

 

[noidis]

I'm kinda confused on how to connect them. The instructions say to put the second card in the slot farthest away, but I believe the PCI slot farthest away is only a x8 and not x16 like the other two.

I'm assuming you mean how do you connect the two cards in terms of SLI?

If that's the case, it's simply by connecting the SLI bridge (Which should have come with one of the cards you purchased). It connects over the top on each card and it's that simple.

Make sure you enable SLI in the menu's as well.

 

[james9120]

I'm assuming you mean how do you connect the two cards in terms of SLI?

If that's the case, it's simply by connecting the SLI bridge (Which should have come with one of the cards you purchased). It connects over the top on each card and it's that simple.

Make sure you enable SLI in the menu's as well.

That part I get, what I don't understand is that the instructions say to insert the cards like this... I have 3 PCI slots, so 1 2 3. The first two are x16, and the 3rd is x8. The instructions say plug the cards in the 1 and 3 slot. So one card would be at full 16x, and the other only 8x. Can I just plug the card into the # 2 slot instead? If It'll even fit lol

 

[Sunius]

It will fit in any PCIe slot, speed doesn't matter. I wouldn't worry about PCIe x8, as GTX 560 Ti will not saturate the full bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 x8 slot. The reason for this is that our PCIe tech is way ahead of modern graphics cards, even GTX 680 doesn't fully saturate PCIe 2.0 x16.

If you plug one card into x8 slot and another into x16 slot, they will both run at x8 speed, but don't worry about it! The performance won't drop. Remember, when cards run in SLI, they run in synchronized mode, each rendering every second frame, so they must run at exactly same speed.

The reason for placing the cards into the slots that are furthest away from each other is heat. Usually, temps are higher in SLI, and if you place them close together, the lower card will 'cook' the upper one. Also, make sure the card with better cool to be the top one.

Last thing, do not forget the SLI bridge! It won't work without it.