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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dmans - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
my 8800 gt is better than this thing.mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Google for, "Ian PC tests", it's the 1st link that comes back. Scroll down the page
for the full list of results pages (I've done a whlole bunch). Voila, a mountain of
8800GT data for you to chew on. 8-) And much more to add!
Ian.
HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
"lan PC tests". Hmm. I get a reviews.cnet.com link for a WiFi antenna.And, can you please stop spamming the comments?
mapesdhs - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
I'm not spamming the comments, I'm providing real info to help people
out. Re the Google, it could be because being in the UK I'm forced
to use google.co.uk which may give different results to google.com
(probably does). Alas, nothing I can do about that (hmm, "try, "Ian SGI
UK" instead, that should bring up the right link). If you want to know
what I'm talking about though, send me a PM and I'll send you the refs
so you can see what I mean. People keep asking upgrade questions
which review articles do not or cannot answer, eg. those playing
older games, at lesser resolutions, with systems that don't have uber
CPUs, etc.. I've been working to provide the info that answers such
questions (have you?). That isn't spamming.
Ian.
HangFire - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
>my 8800 gt is better than this thing.That would make it faster than the GTX260 as well. That's some 8800GT!
I love the value that my 8800GT provided, but it is sitting on the shelf now for a reason.
sheh - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I'm not one to comment on this sort of things in general but I must in this case. Each instance of "in to" in the graphics hardware articles comes with a mental dissonance I have to resolve before reading can be resumed.http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/into.html
http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/definitions/into-...
Other than that, keep up the good work. :)
gammaray - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I don't understand the logic behind the pricing of video cards nowadays.Low end video cards like this new 550ti should be below 100$
mid range video cards 150ish and
high end 200-250$ MAXIMUM
mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
An item is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay.
There are those with big budgets who are happy to pay $600+, hence products
to match such affordability exist and always will do.
If you had something to sell, would you let someone buy it for $200 if you had
a different customer who was happy to pay you $400? ;)
Such is the law of supply & demand. I deal with this every day with respect to
buying/selling used SGI items. Hobbyists assume old items should be cheap
because they're old and they don't want to pay much, but in reality commercial
demand for certain items extremely strong, so the real value is sometimes very
high. Same basic concept applies to anything really. A brand of chocolate
cookies my gf & I particularly like have gone up in price recently by quite a lot,
and I'm sure it's because they are popular. Demand rise = price rise.
In some parts of the world, the market for high-end consumers GPUs is quite strong.
Ian.
Will Robinson - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
What a shame to soil the good reputation of past and present Ti cards on this dud.Belard - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
"TI" is meaningless. Might as well mean "Total Idiot".If they took out the "TI", it would still be the same product. Its all marketing to get people to remember about the old $200 kick-ass 4200~4600 cards... before the GF 5800 debacle.
TI originally was about its manufacturing (so they say), but look back. There were no 4200 and 4200 TI, right? They divide the GF2-tech cards into 4x0MX and the state of the art into 4x00TI.
We'll soon see the return of MX, PRO and Ultras I think... hell, maybe even the "Geforce GTX ti 785 Ultra TNT" in 2012.