Review: Zotac GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Edition

Overview

You didn't think you were only going to get one version of the new GTX 560 Ti out of us did you? Always willing to push a little further here's Zotac's take on the new card, the Zotac GTX 560 Ti Limited Edition 448 Cores.

Now, in the Asus GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Direct CU II review we've already spoken about how it's not really a standard Nvidia GTX 560 Ti at all, bar the nomenclature.

So we wont spend any more words discussing Nvidia's new marketing strategy for its old chips.

But there is another interesting facet to this new GTX 560 Ti's make up. And that's how the individual manufacturers create their cards.

Nvidia has made no reference designs for this chip and that means there are no hard and fast rules for the clockspeed settings.

And that, in turn, means the card manufacturers can release what are effectively overclocked cards straight off the bat.

Benchmarks

You can immediately tell the slight performance boost the out-of-the-box factory overclock gives you.

It's easy to assume from that the Zotac is the faster card but, while that is true at stock settings, the Asus card will easily outstrip the Zotac when you start waving the overclocking stick around.

DirectX 11 tessellation performance

DirectX 11 gaming performance

Verdict

So, in steps Zotac, it of the overclocked AMP! edition cards, with it's own up-clocked version of the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Editon.

Compared with the Asus GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Direct CU II version we've previously checked out this leaps out of the box with a 33MHz boost in clockspeed and a subsequently speedier shader clock too.

Granted that's hardly a lot to shout about in terms of clockspeeds, but it does give a nice little boost in the Heaven score.

If you're not much of a tinkerer and prefer to leave your graphics at their stock settings then picking up a slightly higher clocked card oput of the box is probably more your bag.

That rings true in terms of pricing too. This Zotac card is around £30 cheaper than the Asus version with its vast cooling array.

The only reason to opt for that Asus card over this one would be if you were looking to push the card as fast as possible.

The smaller cooling setup on this Zotac card cannot cope with the 900MHz speeds we squeezed out of the Asus board. That's not to say we couldn't get anything out of this more diminutive card; we were able to push it up to 850MHz stably, though rather warmly.

Speaking of size though, the Zotac version is a far more space-conscious offering than the massive Asus card.

It's shorter and, while still a dual-slot part, it should fit happier in tighter chassis.

Zotac's GTX 560 Ti 448 card actually ends up making a lot more sense than the Asus version.

At £250 the Asus version is only a little cheaper than the same cooler-heavy GTX 570 Direct CU II from Asus.

Essentially making it a complete irrelevance by comparison.

The Zotac card however fits in nicely between the standard GTX 560 Ti and the standard GTX 570.

We'd still recommend the faster GTX 570 at only £35 more, but if you're already struggling to scrape together £220 for a new GPU, and lets face it who isn't, then the Zotac card has a lot going for it.

It's almost the same speed as a true Nvidia GTX 570 and comes in cheaper. It's not quite as well designed a card as the Asus offering, but in price positioning it just makes a lot more sense.

We liked:

Coming with higher clockspeeds out of the box, and a lower price-tag to boot, makes this a far more relevant version of the limited edition card.

We disliked:

It's still only a little cheaper than the fully-fledged GTX 570, so if you can save a little longer that will give you much more for your money.

Final word:

A GTX 560 Ti 448 that makes more sense in such a crowded marketplace.

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Review: Zotac GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Edition

Overview

You didn't think you were only going to get one version of the new GTX 560 Ti out of us did you? Always willing to push a little further here's Zotac's take on the new card, the Zotac GTX 560 Ti Limited Edition 448 Cores.

Now, in the Asus GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Direct CU II review we've already spoken about how it's not really a standard Nvidia GTX 560 Ti at all, bar the nomenclature.

So we wont spend any more words discussing Nvidia's new marketing strategy for its old chips.

But there is another interesting facet to this new GTX 560 Ti's make up. And that's how the individual manufacturers create their cards.

Nvidia has made no reference designs for this chip and that means there are no hard and fast rules for the clockspeed settings.

And that, in turn, means the card manufacturers can release what are effectively overclocked cards straight off the bat.

Benchmarks

You can immediately tell the slight performance boost the out-of-the-box factory overclock gives you.

It's easy to assume from that the Zotac is the faster card but, while that is true at stock settings, the Asus card will easily outstrip the Zotac when you start waving the overclocking stick around.

DirectX 11 tessellation performance

DirectX 11 gaming performance

Verdict

So, in steps Zotac, it of the overclocked AMP! edition cards, with it's own up-clocked version of the GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Limited Editon.

Compared with the Asus GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores Direct CU II version we've previously checked out this leaps out of the box with a 33MHz boost in clockspeed and a subsequently speedier shader clock too.

Granted that's hardly a lot to shout about in terms of clockspeeds, but it does give a nice little boost in the Heaven score.

If you're not much of a tinkerer and prefer to leave your graphics at their stock settings then picking up a slightly higher clocked card oput of the box is probably more your bag.

That rings true in terms of pricing too. This Zotac card is around £30 cheaper than the Asus version with its vast cooling array.

The only reason to opt for that Asus card over this one would be if you were looking to push the card as fast as possible.

The smaller cooling setup on this Zotac card cannot cope with the 900MHz speeds we squeezed out of the Asus board. That's not to say we couldn't get anything out of this more diminutive card; we were able to push it up to 850MHz stably, though rather warmly.

Speaking of size though, the Zotac version is a far more space-conscious offering than the massive Asus card.

It's shorter and, while still a dual-slot part, it should fit happier in tighter chassis.

Zotac's GTX 560 Ti 448 card actually ends up making a lot more sense than the Asus version.

At £250 the Asus version is only a little cheaper than the same cooler-heavy GTX 570 Direct CU II from Asus.

Essentially making it a complete irrelevance by comparison.

The Zotac card however fits in nicely between the standard GTX 560 Ti and the standard GTX 570.

We'd still recommend the faster GTX 570 at only £35 more, but if you're already struggling to scrape together £220 for a new GPU, and lets face it who isn't, then the Zotac card has a lot going for it.

It's almost the same speed as a true Nvidia GTX 570 and comes in cheaper. It's not quite as well designed a card as the Asus offering, but in price positioning it just makes a lot more sense.

We liked:

Coming with higher clockspeeds out of the box, and a lower price-tag to boot, makes this a far more relevant version of the limited edition card.

We disliked:

It's still only a little cheaper than the fully-fledged GTX 570, so if you can save a little longer that will give you much more for your money.

Final word:

A GTX 560 Ti 448 that makes more sense in such a crowded marketplace.

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Review: Zotac A75-ITX WiFi

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Overview

Zotac is really making a mark for itself as a motherboard manufacturer, especially in the small form factor arena, and this Zotac A75-ITX WiFi certainly looks to continue that trend.

We checked out the Z68-ITX WiFi a little while back and its combination of packed PCB and impressive performance made it an incredibly interesting prospect for a wee Intel Sandy Bridge machine.

More suited to the smaller PC though is AMD's Llano APU. In a form factor where space is at a premium having decent graphics power on-chip makes for a well-rounded machine in a very tight space.

Intel's Sandy Bridge may also have integrated graphics but that hardly gives you much power beyond a little light media play and standard web-crawling.

The Llano APUs though have discrete-class graphics prowess, maybe not of the high-end calibre, but certainly far better than anything we've seen before.

So what compromises have been made to the A75 platform to squeeze it down into this small form factor?

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Benchmarks

You can see from the results below the CPU component of the Llano APU is being hobbled by the motherboard itself. In both the Asus ATX and MSI mATX boards the chips perform far better at straight, traditional CPU tasks.

On the gaming side though there is no such compromise in performance; good news for the mini PC gamer.

CPU rendering performance

CPU gaming performance

DX11 gaming performance

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Verdict

Inevitably there's less space on the motherboard itself to allow more than two DIMM slots and a single x16 PCIe connector, but in such a small form factor neither represent a massive compromise.

Indeed given the restraints having a discrete GPU in the PCIe slot places on the CPU component of the Llano APUs you could argue that maybe you don't need one at all.

That said dropping in a small discrete card, like a half-height AMD Radeon HD 6670, gives you a hell of a boost in graphical performance with Llano's Dual Graphics functionality.

We notched up over 25fps in DiRT 3 at 1920x1080 on the Ultra settings, and for a tiny PC sat beneath your HD tele that wouldn't be bad at all.

You'd need a rather chunkier GPU to be able to do that on an Intel platform.

But still performance does suffer. The straight line CPU scores are a way down compared with the sort of numbers we've been getting out of either ATX or micro-ATX desktop Llano boards. Looking at either Cinebench or the CPU score from Shogun 2 and the performance of the Zotac A75-ITX is noticeably off the pace.

Thankfully that's only on the CPU side – if you look at the gaming performance of the Llano APU in the little Zotac board it stands toe-to-toe with the larger boards out there.

And as you're unlikely to be doing any seriously processor intensive tasks on such a small box, at least you shouldn't be expecting to, that's not a major problem either.

As such you wouldn't be expecting it to be much of an overclocking board either, despite the huge amount of processor head-room the A-series, desktop Llano chips have in them. This seems to be where one of the main areas of compromise lies; there is no way to boost the performance of the APU.

In the BIOS there is an option which looks like it ought to up the multiplier, but as the A-series multipliers are locked down, a la Sandy Bridge, there's nothing happening in the performance stakes. It's a bit of a shame given what we've managed to squeeze out of the A-series chips before, but for an inexpensive little board serious CPU performance isn't a necessary requirement.

But being an inexpensive little board is. Unfortunately you're paying quite a premium for the size of the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi, even our favourite A75, the Asus F1A75-V Pro is well over a tenner cheaper and that does have the performance chops.

We liked:

The fact there is so much squeezed into the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi is impressive. With such serious connectivity options too that's no mean feat; there's dual Gigabit ethernet ports on the back with twin WiFi antennae sticking out too.

The lack of compromise on the gaming performance too is a very welcome surprise, especially given how hobbled the CPU component seems in this board.

We disliked:

Sadly that CPU performance is a shame. It's not a huge issue in small form factor boards, but knowing you're missing out on performance you have actually paid for is disappointing.

As is the lack of any overclocking possibilities that we could see with the long legs of the AMD A-series APUs.

There's also the fact it is rather more expensive than better performing, though larger motherboards. Even the mATX boards keep the CPU parts ticking over nicely.

Final word:

So if form factor is an issue for you, then you're going to have to pay for it.

But still, Zotac has crammed a huge amount onto this tiny slab of PCB and as the basis for a fully-functional Fusion mini PC it's hard to beat.

]]>

Review: Zotac A75-ITX WiFi

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Overview

Zotac is really making a mark for itself as a motherboard manufacturer, especially in the small form factor arena, and this Zotac A75-ITX WiFi certainly looks to continue that trend.

We checked out the Z68-ITX WiFi a little while back and its combination of packed PCB and impressive performance made it an incredibly interesting prospect for a wee Intel Sandy Bridge machine.

More suited to the smaller PC though is AMD's Llano APU. In a form factor where space is at a premium having decent graphics power on-chip makes for a well-rounded machine in a very tight space.

Intel's Sandy Bridge may also have integrated graphics but that hardly gives you much power beyond a little light media play and standard web-crawling.

The Llano APUs though have discrete-class graphics prowess, maybe not of the high-end calibre, but certainly far better than anything we've seen before.

So what compromises have been made to the A75 platform to squeeze it down into this small form factor?

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Benchmarks

You can see from the results below the CPU component of the Llano APU is being hobbled by the motherboard itself. In both the Asus ATX and MSI mATX boards the chips perform far better at straight, traditional CPU tasks.

On the gaming side though there is no such compromise in performance; good news for the mini PC gamer.

CPU rendering performance

CPU gaming performance

DX11 gaming performance

Zotac A75-ITX WiFi - Verdict

Inevitably there's less space on the motherboard itself to allow more than two DIMM slots and a single x16 PCIe connector, but in such a small form factor neither represent a massive compromise.

Indeed given the restraints having a discrete GPU in the PCIe slot places on the CPU component of the Llano APUs you could argue that maybe you don't need one at all.

That said dropping in a small discrete card, like a half-height AMD Radeon HD 6670, gives you a hell of a boost in graphical performance with Llano's Dual Graphics functionality.

We notched up over 25fps in DiRT 3 at 1920x1080 on the Ultra settings, and for a tiny PC sat beneath your HD tele that wouldn't be bad at all.

You'd need a rather chunkier GPU to be able to do that on an Intel platform.

But still performance does suffer. The straight line CPU scores are a way down compared with the sort of numbers we've been getting out of either ATX or micro-ATX desktop Llano boards. Looking at either Cinebench or the CPU score from Shogun 2 and the performance of the Zotac A75-ITX is noticeably off the pace.

Thankfully that's only on the CPU side – if you look at the gaming performance of the Llano APU in the little Zotac board it stands toe-to-toe with the larger boards out there.

And as you're unlikely to be doing any seriously processor intensive tasks on such a small box, at least you shouldn't be expecting to, that's not a major problem either.

As such you wouldn't be expecting it to be much of an overclocking board either, despite the huge amount of processor head-room the A-series, desktop Llano chips have in them. This seems to be where one of the main areas of compromise lies; there is no way to boost the performance of the APU.

In the BIOS there is an option which looks like it ought to up the multiplier, but as the A-series multipliers are locked down, a la Sandy Bridge, there's nothing happening in the performance stakes. It's a bit of a shame given what we've managed to squeeze out of the A-series chips before, but for an inexpensive little board serious CPU performance isn't a necessary requirement.

But being an inexpensive little board is. Unfortunately you're paying quite a premium for the size of the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi, even our favourite A75, the Asus F1A75-V Pro is well over a tenner cheaper and that does have the performance chops.

We liked:

The fact there is so much squeezed into the Zotac A75-ITX WiFi is impressive. With such serious connectivity options too that's no mean feat; there's dual Gigabit ethernet ports on the back with twin WiFi antennae sticking out too.

The lack of compromise on the gaming performance too is a very welcome surprise, especially given how hobbled the CPU component seems in this board.

We disliked:

Sadly that CPU performance is a shame. It's not a huge issue in small form factor boards, but knowing you're missing out on performance you have actually paid for is disappointing.

As is the lack of any overclocking possibilities that we could see with the long legs of the AMD A-series APUs.

There's also the fact it is rather more expensive than better performing, though larger motherboards. Even the mATX boards keep the CPU parts ticking over nicely.

Final word:

So if form factor is an issue for you, then you're going to have to pay for it.

But still, Zotac has crammed a huge amount onto this tiny slab of PCB and as the basis for a fully-functional Fusion mini PC it's hard to beat.

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Review: Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi

Overview

The Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi really is an ITX board. Zotac, the mad fool, has opted to stick Intel's latest and greatest tech – the Z68 chipset with Sandy Bridge processor architecture – onto one of the smallest motherboard form factors available, but that's what Zotac does.

What's impressive is that Zotac has done this and managed to retain almost all of the features you'd expect on a full ATX motherboard.

The single available x16 PCIe slot is certainly a little less than you'd usually expect, while a mere two DIMM slots support 16GB of system memory.

That aside, there are three digital video outputs, four SATA ports, two USB 3.0 ports, eight channel audio with digital out and enough space left for Gigabit networking and twin wireless N antenna. It's a mighty feast of technology from a tiny serving. But, as we all know, good things come in little packages.

We just have to hope the Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi is one of these good little things.

Benchmarks

We equipped the Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi with all the necessary tools to rip through a few standard benchmarks, including an Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600S and 4GB of 2000MHz DDR3 memory.

We use the same standard three tests that push all cores and hyperthreading suitably to the limit, with processing, encoding and gaming.

Verdict

Zotac should be the master of mini-ITX design – its range of this sub-ATX-sized standard is extensive and covers everything from the Intel Atom to this latest Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi motherboard. And it joins a growing number of these micro-sized motherboards.

Despite its size, it does effectively cram in everything you need to create a cutting-edge system.

We're particularly impressed by the two HDMI and single DisplayPort connections.

Coupled with the Intel HD graphics, it's capable of driving three 1080p digital panels, and that's before you've plugged anything into the x16 PCIe slot.

The downside is this does drop a bank of installed USB and eSATA ports, which was, for example, found on the sister Zotac H67-ITX Wi-Fi motherboard.

Board layout in general is nearly perfect. The big issue for us is the positioning of components that will block any cooler backplate. This is a rather critical issue if you're using anything but a standard snap-in cooler.

Adding additional flexibility, an onboard mini-PCIe slot comes populated with an 802.11n wireless card, and two antenna connections are installed on the ATX backplate. Alternatively, the Intel Z68 chipset does support the use of a mini-PCIe SSD to enable the Smart Response Technology, to help boost conventional HDD performance.

System installation is a pretty smooth affair. This isn't helped by the somewhat sparse install disc, though, which doesn't provide any sort of unattended driver installation or any additional extras.

That aside, we can't criticise the supplied hardware extras, including an mSATA mount, mini DP-to-DP adaptor and USB 3.0 backplate.

We liked

Beautiful build quality, solid if unremarkable benchmarks and a neatly packaged product help justify the pricing of this latest Intel Z68-based motherboard.

The balance of ports is just right, and while we may miss a DVI port, adaptors are at hand. The Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi even performed well as an overclocking board.

We disliked

As much as we continue to be impressed by just how much can be crammed onto these tiny ITX motherboards, we have to wonder who is buying them?

That's no slight against Zotac. But beyond a small media centre system or a specialised project, why would you opt for this over a similarly priced but more flexible ATX board?

Final verdict

The Zotac Z68-ITX Wi-Fi is a delightfully accomplished mini-motherboard that packs a lot of technology into a small frame. But it does so at a price, and for little extra performance.

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