£235 inc VAT * www3.pny.com • tinyurl.com/3ub8u3g
If money doesn't enter the equation in your quest for ultimate gaming performance, both ATI and nVidia sell incredibly pricey graphics cards that make even our most expensive nVidia GeForce GTX 580 (paqe 67) seem a bargain. The dual-GPU GTX 590 costs around £600, for example - a colossal amount of money to spend on a graphics cards upgrade. If you've sensibly got your sights set a little lower, PNY's Performance Edition GTX 570 will make mincemeat out of any game you throw at it - both now and in years to come. The PNY sticks closely to nVidia's reference design, with a 732MHz core clock speed and 480 stream processors running at 1,464MHz. It has 1,280MB of video memory and a mighty 480bit interface, which delivers a whopping 152Gbps memory bandwidth. Its texture fill rate is slightly lower than that of the GTX 560 Ti (reviewed left), however, at 43.9GTps. The PNY blew the similar-price ATI Radeon HD 6970 (paqe 64) out of the water in our games tests. We recorded 125fps in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at 1280x1024 pixels, which is around 8 percent faster than the HD 6970's 114fps. At 1920x1080 pixels it had a smaller lead of 90fps compared with 88fps. The GTX 570 performed significantly better at lower resolutions in Stalker: Call of Pripyat, although the results were broadly similar at 1920x1080 pixels. The HD 6970 had the edge in Crysis. The GTX 570 requires two six-pin power connectors (adaptors are included). nVidia recommends a 550W-rated PSU as the minimum that should be used with this card. The HD 6970 also specifies a 550W PSU, but requires one six-pin and one eight-pin connector. Although the GTX 570 isn't the most powerful card in our group test - that award goes to the Zotac GeForce GTX 580 AMP2 - it offers the best compromise between price and performance. With a small performance lead at some resolutions and a lower price tag than its closest ATI rival, the HD 6970, we think it's the better deal. VERDICT: PNY's GeForce GTX 570 Performance offers a high-value graphics upgrade that'll repay you for years to come. If the HD 6970 drops in price, however, that card may offer better value.
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