Looking for a new card

I've been looking around for a new card and come across an unusual card that seems to be too cheap to be true.

Looked at the following Cards

Asus GeForce GTX 560 Ti 900MHz 2GB PCI-Express HDMI DirectCU II

Asus GeForce GT 640 901MHz 2GB PCI-Express 3.0 HDMI

At the British Telecom Shop

Can anyone tell me what the difference is and why the 640 is so Cheap Also, is it worth buying one of the above when I already have 2 x Asus GTS 450 on SLI

Hello there Vipermk2.

As per my rather indepth post in the thread, What affects FPS linked below:-

What affects fps?

There's a massive gulf of performance between the GTX 560 Ti and the GT 640 which is reflected in the prices of those two cards respectively.

Compare the specs of those two cards from NVIDIA's website:-

GT 640 specs:-

GeForce GT 640 | Specifications | GeForce

GTX 560 Ti specs:-

GeForce GTX 560 Ti | Specifications | GeForce

(The portion below is partly quoted from my own previous post)

The influence each spec has on the relative performance of the card, sorted by greatest to lowest:-

The amount of Shaders/CUDA cores (as compared to the same family/generation of cards),

followed by the card's ROPs,

Shader/Processor/CUDA core clocks,

Memory Type (Dedicated, or Integrated) and Interface (64, 128, 256 and 384 bit) ,

Memory Speeds (clocks) and Generation (DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5) and

finally, the Amount of Memory (512 MB - 3 GB).

When you compare the GTX 560 Ti and GT 640, you have to note that the although 560 Ti (384) has the same number of CUDA cores as the GT 640 (384), and the same CUDA core clocks (~900Mhz), the next important spec, which is the memory interface and type greatly favours the GTX 560 Ti (256 bit vs 128 bit, and GDDR5 vs DDR 3) and results in the overwhelming performance advantage that the GTX 560 Ti will show in games, thus costing almost double compared to the GT 640.


It is irrelevant to compare the memory sizes of the two cards, because although the GT 640 and the GTX 560 Ti may both have 2 GB onboard, the GTX 560 Ti's GDDR5 memory is running at a much greater speed as compared to the GT 640's inferior DDR3 solution.


And to answer your question of whether the single GTX 560 would be superior to your current GTS 450 SLI solution, the performance would be about the same, but the 560 Ti solution would be superior for games with poorly implemented SLI support

GTS 450 SLI or 560 ti? - Nvidia - Graphic-Displays

Whats better? GTS 450 sli or gtx 560 ti?

Hope that helps clear it up a little. Thanks for reading.

Wow, Thank you for a quick and detailed response, that answers all the questions I had forming in my mind. I think for now I'll stick with the 450 until the price of the 560 comes down then may get 2 of those.

Vipermk2 said:

Wow, Thank you for a quick and detailed response, that answers all the questions I had forming in my mind. I think for now I'll stick with the 450 until the price of the 560 comes down then may get 2 of those.

Glad I could help.

It does get kinda confusing nowadays.

Advertisements for those cards often shove the wrong aspects of the cards into the consumers face, and they fall for it, hook, line and sinker.