Galaxy GeForce GTX560Ti-MDT-X5

Galaxy GeForce GTX 560 Ti MDT X5 Review

When you think multimonitor gaming, chances are AMD’s Eyefinity is your first thought. That’s because Nvidia’s best stab at gaming on more than two monitors requires a second graphics card. All that changes with the Galaxy GeForce GTX560Ti MDT X5, a graphics card that lets you run up to five displays simultaneously.

As its name suggests, this is a graphics card based on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti. It’s a DX11 graphics card that features 384 CUDA cores, a 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer, and a 256-bit memory interface. From a specs perspective, there’s very little to distinguish this card from another GeForce GTX 560 Ti, but out of the box, it’s immediately clear that this card is very different. The heatsink shroud is a single piece of brushed aluminum labeled “Galaxy MDT X5” on the left side of the fan and “Display 5” etched on the right side of the fan. The magic happens at the bracket: There’s a DVI port, DisplayPort output, and a row of four mini HDMI ports along the top edge of the bracket. This card can support up to five concurrent displays and up to four of them in games in your choice of 2×2 stack mode (up to 2,560 x 1600) or 4×1 (up to 5,760 x 900) span mode. It also supports “smaller” configurations, including 3×1 span mode (up to 5,040 x 1,050).

To get a better look at the driving force behind Galaxy’s unique MDT X5, we removed the heatsink shroud and found dual raised mezzanine PCBs upon which is soldered IDT’s VMM1400EQG ViewXpand Multi-Monitor Controller IC. This chip utilizes a DisplayPort interface from the GF114 for input and outputs to four HDMI ports.

When connecting this card to three monitors, all we had to do was plug the extra displays into the mini HDMI ports in the correct order. When running with mismatched monitors, the card finds a resolution compatible with all three, but in our case, it cut off the edges of our larger monitors. We recommend using displays with matched resolution capabilities, but if you can’t, jump into the Nvidia control panel and create a custom resolution.

We did play games at the 3×1 configuration, and found playable frame rates in all three games we test with. Despite this, we ran the benchmarks on a single monitor at the resolutions specified, so you can gauge how this card will perform compared to a typical GTX 560. And even though Galaxy left the core clock alone, the copperheatpiped heatsink signals some serious overclocking potential; with Galaxy’s Xtreme Tuner utility, adding 100MHz to the core clock is entirely within reach.

Although the GeForce GTX560Ti MDT X5 will set you back significantly more than a stock GTX 560 Ti, that price is the result of some serious hardware improvements. Finally, multimonitor gaming is not only practical on Nvidia, but fun, too.

 

Galaxy GeForce GTX 560Ti MDT X5 vs Gigabyte GTX560

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