Which 560Ti is right for me?

Nesher

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Feb 22, 2012
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Hello!

I'm planning a new build quite soon. Most probably I will order the parts so that I have them by mid-May, as I will be moving to a smaller town then, which means I would have to pay postage if I order at a later point, while I now simply can pick up most parts from proper pc-stores for decent prices.

The build is along the lines of last weeks budget-build, ie. the aim is to get good frames while gaming at 1900x1080, which is the best my monitor can handle. I'd guess the computer will be used roughly 50/50 for gaming/other tasks (browsing, writing, excel-spreadsheets, and so on...) if looking at the time spent. However, this is very much planned as being a (budget) gaming-pc first. I am an engineer, so there is a possibility that I sometime in the future will have somekind of a CAD-suite on the computer. Planned parts as follows:

CPU: i3-2120
MB: AsRock H61 U3S3
PSU: XFX 550 W Core Edition
RAM: 4 GB DDR3 1333 MHz
HDD: 500 GB SATA3 72000 rpm

And now for the question: I have been planning to put a GTX 560 Ti in it, as, by reading reviews and forums, it seems like anything over this will more or less be a waste considering the resolution I'm aiming for or will be bottlenecked by the rest of the system. The cards I've been locking at include:

Gigabyte GTX560Ti 1GB PCI-E OC - 220 €
ASUS GTX560Ti 1024MB DDR5 DirectCU II - 214 €
ASUS GTX 560 TI DCII TOP 1GB - 222 €
EVGA GTX 560 Ti Superclocked - 224 €

Now, the first question is obviously do I get any practical benefit from paying sligthly more for a factory overclocked card compared to a reference (the Asus DirectCU II non-TOP in this case)? Can one e.g. state that in general (yes, I know, many variables), a overclocked card will give X FPS more compared to a reference?

I am probably not going to overclock myself, and I am on a budget so obviously any money saved is a nice bonus for me. The Asus GTX 560 Ti TOP does look good, but is out of stock at the moment (the store expects more, but doesn't know when they will come). How does the three OC-cards compare? Is there one that is decidedly better/worse than the others, or is there one brand that I should go for/stay away from?

Obviously, if I would be better served by a 6950 (the cheapest one around here is the Asus HD6950 1GB PCI-E DCII for 234 €) or a factory OC 6870 (e.g. Gigabyte Radeon HD 6870 OC - 1GB GDDR5 for 175 €), or something else, feel free to say so. This is my first build, and I am still very much learning here.
 

computernewb

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Aug 9, 2010
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You cant really go wrong with any of those. Since you are not going to overclock, you'd probably wanted the highest clocked one. Also, EVGA has one of the best reputations for graphics cards. The highest rated video cards by customers on newegg is EVGA.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=48&name=Desktop-Graphics-Cards&Order=RATING&Pagesize=100

If you can find a HD 7850, its a really good card as well. Its slightly more expensive than a 560ti though but it consumes a lot less energy.

Here is a comparison between a 560ti and a 7850.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/549?vs=547
 

Anik8

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Sep 17, 2010
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twin frozr 2 is an older design,the 560ti hawk uses twin frozr 3 cooling deign,has superior quality components and scales better than the tf2 variants.
 

Nesher

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Feb 22, 2012
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Thank you very much for all replies so far!

The reason I picked the cards in the round-up is simply that these are the cheapest alternatives I've found in stores around here (and in in-country webstores). The Twin Frozr e.g. already goes up to 235 €, which obviously isn't that much more when compared to the EVGA, but then otoh the EVGA is already 10 € more than the stock Asus 560 Ti, so the difference between them is already ~10 %. Compared to the 6870 OC at 235 € (which I probably could live with if I had to...) the Twin Frozr is already 60 € more expensive, so being on a budget these 10 € difference quite soon stack up to amounts that start to chew at the sums I've allocated to the other parts.
 

Nesher

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Feb 22, 2012
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I'll probably stay with air-cooling. As I'm not planning on overclocking, only using a single graphic card and so on, I don't think I'll gain anything (other than some bragging rights :D ) by going watercooled.