NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
As we don’t have a true reference card our testing methodology has been slightly tweaked. We’ve tested the AMP at both GTX 550 Ti reference clocks and at its factory overclock for all metrics, however power/noise/temperature data is going to significantly vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.
For drivers NVIDIA is pairing ForceWare 267.59 with the card – these drivers are just incremental bugfixes, SLI profiles, and product additions over the earlier Release 265 series drivers and performance is unchanrged for other cards from earlier results.
Meanwhile for the AMD cards we’re using the Catalyst 11.4 preview for the 5770 and 6800 series. While the bulk of the performance improvements in these drivers (in what AMD is now calling Project Mjölnir) are for the new Cayman/VLIW4 architecture, Barts/Evergreen/VLIW5 performance has ticked up a couple percent here and there, further raising the bar that NVIDIA needs to cross.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Asus Rampage II Extreme |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Summit (120GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6990 AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB AMD Radeon HD 6870 AMD Radeon HD 6850 AMD Radeon HD 5970 AMD Radeon HD 5870 AMD Radeon HD 5850 AMD Radeon HD 5770 AMD Radeon HD 4870X2 AMD Radeon HD 4870 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 262.99 NVIDIA ForceWare 266.56 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 266.58 NVIDIA ForceWare 257.59 Beta AMD Catalyst 10.10e AMD Catalyst 11.1a Hotfix AMD Catalyst 11.4 Preview |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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vedye - Thursday, March 17, 2011 - link
Thanks for pointing that out!! But the author will not respond to you. Anantech is already proven pro-Nvidia. If I were them, I would ignore ur post as well. Just keep pretending.Demon-Xanth - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
From the consumer standpoint, why would I get a 550 over a 460? I read through this and can't come up with a single reason.Gami - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
there's no point in getting it.. they need to eliminate the stock of the 400 series first, from all outlets, so that this thing would actually have a chance to be even thought of being bought.Taft12 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Soon that reason will be "the GTX 460 768MB is not available", but that is not yet true, and indeed there is no reason to buy this card.qwertymac93 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
how did they get 1GB of memory with a 192-bit bus? Are you sure its not 768MB?Demon-Xanth - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
There's a whole page on that. Plus many comments on other pages.z3nny - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Yeah, RTFA.Lolimaster - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
So after near 1.5years HD5770 is the better buy for mid value customers. Right now in many places HD6850 costs less than the 460 1GB and performs better (even more with the new 11.4pre and future (mejolnir "driver" updates)qwertymac93 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
never mind, read the next page... And now i wish you guys had an edit function...z3nny - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
It would have helped if you RTFA first before posting like a fool.