Why would anyone buy an nVidia 560...

[~REALiTY]

I didn't say it's not a good deal. It's a good deal now. I'd recommend it to some people.

But those shouting that it's a good card are wrong. It is expensive to make and was meant to be sold for £400, where few wanted to have it for that price, because it was just not good enough. It's good enough for £180 that's true. But what you are getting is unsold stock being dumped at you. Grab it while you can, if you're happy with 250 watts power draw. I'd personally get 6950 and later another one.

Seriously wrong there........

Judging by the numbers above my post it looks like you just want to save pennies on your power consumption, yeh it draws more power but guess what its more powerful than the 6950. They arent going to keep selling them at £400 when the 580 goes for £379.99 lowest price on here anyway are they?

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/309?vs=293

480 beats the 6950 in the majority there and its not even that much more expensive :/

 

[555BUK]

Stop being Nvidia fanboy and you will discover many things for yourself. Details on power consumption here: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_580_Lightning/21.html

In defense of Fermi, TPU measured max power draw whilst running Furmark. NVidia still retain significantly better shader performance than AMD and Furmark effectively lights up all of those little shaders. Furmark is the worst case scenario for NVidia power consumption, and within games power usage will be much closer. Even the more power efficient 580 with it's TDP choke performs terribly in Furmark. You also need to consider that a GTX480/580 destroys the fps figures of a 6970 within Furmark, My guess is that if you underclock Fermi performance and voltage to match 6970 fps, power usage would be pretty similar.

 

[GiT]

Why would you buy a 560... you want a decent enough card which is very economical and quiet, its also fairly future proof and OC's/SLI's well (specially the brands with the decent coolers)! At the expense of a few FPS on similar priced hot and noisier cards!

OFC I went for the latter still

 

[drifting]

I would rather spend that bit extra for a GTX 570 mainly because its quieter and cooler and is slightly better overall in benchmarks but more or less the same. However I wouldn't touch the 480's they were selling here due to most of them being faulty and they were leftovers from gigabyte as well which would mainly be the reason why.

If I can get a non-reference cooler then I'd strongly prefer 480 over 570 for more vram. However noise is of my primary concern choosing graphics cards so I agree with you.

 

[DELETED_83755]

The GTX 480 is faster but cheaper at the moment as they are EOL and old stock that needs to go asap. It uses roughly 100 more watts than the gtx 560 when gaming, runs hotter and is noticeable louder but faster than the gtx 560.