In a segment where we know a surprise awaits us with every new release, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti lived up to being a bundle of surprises. To begin with, it can bulldoze through any game at any resolution, making DirectX 11 games playable even at the highest resolution. While asking for a higher price than what the GTX 460 1 GB did on its launch, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti lived up to it by giving us excellent price-performance ratio, which surpasses both the Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6950, two SKUs in proximity.
MSI did an excellent job with the design of their GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II. The card offers a substantial performance advantage of 6% over the reference design. Thanks to the Twin Frozr II cooler, the card handles this increase easily without overheating. Power consumption is slightly increased, but well in check. In terms of fan noise, the card delivers excellent results in idle, being quiter than NVIDIA's GTX 560 reference design card. Under load the card turns out to be more noisy, but in return, you get lower temperatures. Considering that temperatures stayed below 80°C under load, even at our highest voltage tuning test I think a slightly lower under-load fan speed would have helped with fan noise and not affected temperatures too much. Manually adjusting the fan speed is something you can do with MSI's excellent Afterburner utility anyway, so this is less of a problem.
Overall MSI's GeForce GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II is a great implementation of a GTX 560 Ti card that offers additional performance out of the box and handles overclocking and thermals very well. With a price of $250, the card costs about as much as other reference design implementations. Very nice!