NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150
by Ryan Smith on March 15, 2011 9:00 AM ESTMeet The Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP Edition
As we stated at the start of this article, NVIDIA is not directly sampling GTX 550 Ti reference cards for this launch. Instead they have left it up to partners to do the sampling. Zotac in turn has provided us with their factory overclocked model, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP, a custom design clocked at 1000MHz core and 1100MHz (4400MHz data rate) memory. We’ll be looking at performance at both stock GTX 550 and Zotac factory clocks.
The AMP is very similar in design to Zotac’s previous GTS 450 AMP card, which is not surprising given the near-perfect compatibility of the GTS 450 and GTX 550 designs. Zotac does not provide thermal/power data for their cards, but with the factory overclock we’d expect it to be a bit more than the 116W for the reference design.
At a hair under 7.5” and using a double-wide cooler design, the AMP is nearly ¾ of an inch shorter than the original GTS 450, reflecting the fact that NVIDIA’s partners often end up producing shorter cards. A simple shroud covers the card, which directs most of the airflow from the 74mm fan out the front and the rear of the card. If we remove the shroud we find a rectangular aluminum heatsink covering the GPU – the GDDR5 memory remains uncovered.
Power is supplied by a single rear-facing 6pin PCIe power socket, which provides more than enough power for a lower-power device such as the AMP. Zotac has outfitted the chip with Hynix GDDR5; 4 1Gb chips and 2 2Gb chips. All of them are rated for 5GHz operation, so even at 4.4GHz the AMP is running its memory below what the chips are capable of, not counting what the bus and GPU itself are capable of handling. Meanwhile as was the case with the GTS 450, a single SLI connector is provided for 2-way SLI.
A common theme with customized Zotac designs is support for additional display connectivity options beyond the NVIDIA reference design, and Zotac does not disappoint here. By shifting a DVI port to the 2nd slot, Zotac has outfitted the card with a full size DisplayPort, along with upgrading the HDMI port from mini to full size; they are still limited in terms of total displays by the GPU however, and even with 4 ports can only drive 2 displays at once. Zotac continues to be one of the only NVIDIA vendors we regularly see support DisplayPort, a sharp contrast from AMD & their partners who include it on virtually everything.
Rounding out the package is the usual collection of extras from Zotac. For hardware this means a molex-to-PCIe power adapter and a DVI-to-VGA adapter. Meanwhile on the software size Zotac continues to provide the Boost Premium package, which includes a collection of OEM & trial copies of various GPU-accelerated programs, including vReveal, Nero Vision, Cooliris, XBMC, and Kylo.
Zotac is pricing the card at $169 $155, $5 more than the NVIDIA MSRP for a basic card. With it comes a 2 year warranty, and a 3rd year is added upon registration.
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silverblue - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
And yet you leapt on him not once but twice about the same thing, despite the OP admitting his/her mistake.Really not constructive.
therealnickdanger - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Perhaps I missed it, but does this carry all the A/V features of other 5xx cards or of 4xx cards?mosox - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
That card is competing with an ATI card that was released in...2009.In this review 6 out of the 10 games tested are TWIMTBP games favoring Nvidia. I guess there will never be transparent criteria for selecting the test games in here. Looking forward to see 110% of the games tested on Anand being TWIMTBP games.
medi01 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
What's TWIMTBP?HangFire - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
The Way It (was) Meant To Be Played- Nvidia's program to encourage game developers to optimize for their video cards.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Our criteria for picking new games is rather straightforward based on several factors: does the game make significant use of hardware features, is it challenging to high-end GPUs, is it possible to get consistent test results, is it popular enough that people play it/know what it is, and does it cover a suitable genre (we don't want all FPSs). We also take reader suggestions in to account - and indeed if you read the article at one point we were soliciting suggestions for a new UE3 game for the next refresh.At this point I honestly couldn't tell you what games in our lineup are TWIMTBP games. It's not something we factor in one way or another. The fact that NV invests as much money as it does in the program is naturally going to make it hard to avoid such games though, if that's what we intended to do.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
As a funny side note, DiRT 2 is an "AMD/ATI" game judging by the loading screens, yet it still favors NVIDIA in general. Ultimately, you buy cards for the performance, price, and power requirements. I'm not sure why you'd even suggest that we're trying to run all TWIMTBP games when our final recommendations are so heavily in favor of the AMD cards this round.nitrousoxide - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
I've been wondering that since the first time I saw Anandtech's graphics test. You are displaying so many data no matter what card you are testing. Is it even relevant to show 5970 or GTX580? That makes the graph less readable.fullback100 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
Yeah I would rather see old video cards like 3850 and 8800GT than 5970 or GTX580. Really, how many people have top of ends cards? There would be a lot more people with video cards from like two generations ago.Taft12 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link
For starters you can't compare older cards on new games that use DX11. Next, most people are surprised to find out just how uncompetitive 2-generation-old cards are. Those 2 are probably in line with current GT440 or 5670. Many miles behind the slowest cards in these comparisons.