NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 TI 448 Core Video Card Review

The MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III PE

Looking at the front of the MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III Power Edition graphics card you’ll see a video card that looks nothing like the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 reference design, but we know that is what the card is loosely based on. MSI custom designed this PCB from the ground to be more robust as they included Military Class II components on it along with the Twin Frozr III dual-fan cooler and a fan speed switch.

The also beefed up the power design to a 6+1 Phase PWM solution to offer more current output to the processor. On top of that MSI allows for the voltage adjustment of the GPU, Memory and the PCIe slot now with the MSI Afterburner utility. MSI has done a number of things to make this card stand out from the crowd!

The MSI N560GTX-448 Twin Frozr III graphics card sports a black and
silver color scheme with a hint of red that helps give it an aggressive look. The PCB of
the card measures 9.5″ in length and stands at 4.0″ in height. It should be
noted that the metal fan shroud extends past the PCB, so the true length of the card is ~9.8″ in length and the height of the card up to ~4.25″ in
height.

One of the main features of the MSI N560GTX-448 is the Twin Frozr III Heatsink. The cooler has two 80mm ‘propeller blade’ PWM fans to help keep the GPU and surrounding areas nice and cool. The fan blades have air channels located along the the edge of the fan blades that help increase the surface area. MSI says that this adjustment increased airflow by 20% compared to conventional fan. The GPU cooler also has a large nickel-plated copper heatsink base and five 8mm heat pipes to help to dissipate heat rapidly away from the GPU. MSI says this cooler operates at 30dB and under 66C at full load!

Here is a slide that MSI provided on the Twin Frozr III cooling solution.

Turning the MSI N560GTX-448 video card over we don’t
find too many interesting things as the card doesn’t have a back plate
or any of the 1280MB GDDR5 memory on the back of the PCB.

The MSI N560GTX-448 1280MB GDDR5 graphics card has a
pair of dual-link DVI-I outputs and a mini-HDMI output. MSI does include
an adapter to go from mini-HDMI-to-HDMI and another to go from
DVI-to-VGA in the bundle included with the card. Both the Dual-link DVI
and HDMI outputs can be used to send high-definition video to an HDTV
via single cable (including audio if running HDMI). A regular sized HDMI
header was not used since it couldn’t fit next to the pair of DVI
outputs.

The MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 graphics card does support dual and 3-way SLI and it has a pair of SLI bridges located along the top edge of the graphics card. The one thing we need to make crystal clear is that you must run SLI with another NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core video card. You can’t SLI one of these cards with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti or a GeForce GTX 570 as the number of cores are different and NVIDIA doesn’t supporting the mixing of GPU cores like that. If you want to run SLI you need to buy a pair of these cards now as NVIDIA only expects the supply of these cards to last for 1-2 months and after that they are going to be very hard to find. The last thing we want to point out in the picture above is that a PCB stiffening bracket (the black bar on top) is included to help stiffen up the card and keep the PCB from bending.

The MSI GeForce NGTX560-448 has a fan profile switch along the top edge of the card that allows you to change between performance or silence fan profiles. This is a nice touch and can easily be adjusted without having to install or mess with any software. Our card came set to the performance fan profile and we left it that way.

The MSI GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core 1GB video card is based of the GeForce GTX 570, so it shouldn’t come as a big shock that it shares similar power requirements and connections. The MSI N560GTX-448 has two 6-pin PCIe connectors along the top of the card that need to be hooked up. NVIDIA recommends a 550 Watt power supply for proper operation of a single card. It should be noted that the NVIDIA minimum system power requirement is based on a PC configured with an Intel Core i7 3.2GHz CPU.