PNY GeForce GTX560 Ti OC graphics card

The graphics card market, perhaps more than any other in technology, has so many price points that sometimes it's hard to keep up.

One of the hardest fought over is the ‘sweet spot', at around £200, where price meets performance. This is where the AMD HD 6870 graphics processor is pitched against Nvidia's GTX560 Ti.

For those unfamiliar with the PNY brand, although it is not as well-known as the usual suspects who produce Nvidia-based graphics cards, the company has been quietly producing cards for both home and professional markets for several years. The Geforce GTX560 Ti Overclocked is part of PNY's XLR8 ‘enthusiast' range.

It uses the GF114 version of the 40nm Fermi core processor which has all the functional units of the core enabled, unlike on some earlier examples of the Fermi architecture. The standard core comes with 384 shaders at a speed of 1644MHz and with a core clock running at 823MHz. The 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs through a 256-bit bus at 1002MHz (4008MHz effective).

For its overclocked version of the GTX560 Ti, PNY has tinkered a little with all the clock speeds: the core has been given a boost of 27MHz so it runs at 850MHz while the shader and memory clocks have been given a leg up to 1700MHz and 1050MHz (4200MHz effective) respectively.

Performance-wise the PNYGTX560 Ti Overclocked made a good fist of some of today's popular games such as Just Cause 2, Dirt 3 and Shogun 2, all tested at the 1080p resolution. Using the Dark Tower map of Just Cause 2's built-in benchmarking tool, the card gave an average frame rate score of 55fps at with all the game's graphics settings on their highest levels. Using Dirt 3's benchmark at the same 1080p resolution gave an average frame rate of 54fps.

At high resolutions it did struggle with Crysis Warhead (32fps at 1080p) but then again it's not the only card that finds that game particularly tough – including a few that cost a fair bit more.

The card uses two six-pin PCI-Express power connectors to power it and PNY has included a PCI-Express-to-Molex power adaptor, just in case your power supply doesn't have the correct amount of power connectors. The package also includes VGA-to-DVI adapter for one of the two DVI ports alongside which sits a single HDMI port.