NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 550 Ti: Coming Up Short At $150

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• HangFire - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  For a while, AT listened and included the 8800GT with most tests. This was a great baseline as most people understood where their card fell in, compared to the 8800GT.
  
  AT has since decided (again) that all of us play nothing but the latest Dx11 games in Dx11 mode with all the goodies turned on, and the only folks upgrading already own Dx11 cards anyway.

• mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  
  Very true!
  
  I've been collating performance results to compare older cards to newer
  models as and when I can. Google: "Ian PC Benchmarks", it's the first link
  that comes back (Blinkenlights site), then select, "PC Benchmarks, Advice
  and Information". Note though that Blinkenlights is a mirror, my main site at
  sgidepot is always updated first and more often.
  
  I've included lots of 8800GT, 4890 and GTX 460 1GB data so far and I've
  just obtained a 9800GT, 3850 AGP (should be a giggle!) and intend to obtain
  various other older cards, including a GTX 275/285. I also have an X1950
  Pro AGP (don't giggle, I got better results than reviews of the PCIe version).
  
  Platform wise, I'm trying to put together a socket 775 build and also an
  AM2/AM3 setup (I've already obtained a Core2Duo 6850 and Q6600
  Core2Quad, though no mbd yet). And I'm adding further P55 examples, eg.
  I've obtained an i5 670 and will be including an i5 760 aswell. All this done
  on a stupid small budget btw (eBay madness), so if anyone has S775 or
  AM2 parts they don't want, feel free to contact me. eBay is not exactly
  bargain central anymore. :\ If you're after the highest price though, eBay
  is best. Or of course free donations are welcome! 8) (I'll cover the postage;
  I'm in the UK) I want to create a spread of data that will be genuinely useful
  to people.
  
  I don't have Crysis or Metro33 to test with, but I've used a good range of
  freely available tests (recommendations welcome; I'm not going to use AVP
  though - I had a look, thought it was rather poor). When I have the time I'll
  also add real game tests using my own tests, focusing more on older titles
  as that's a common issue people have (I'll be testing with Oblivion, the
  1st Stalker game, CoD WAW and a few others).
  
  I'm also including pro apps as & when I can since I do have a number of
  borrowed Quadro FX cards to test aswell (580, 1500, 1700, 4500, 5500,
  5600, etc.) which will all be for sale once the tests are done. So far I've
  done some tests on the 1500 and 5500, but until I sort out a proper certified
  X58 setup (for SLI) the results won't be fully fleshed out (Dell T7500
  barebones on its way, need parts). Interesting to compare gamer & pro cards.
  
  Note that I'm not massively familiar with older gfx cards, so suggestions are
  welcome as to what I should include and/or look for. Feel free to email with
  ideas (contact page is on my site, just email my Yahoo acccount). Don't post
  here though as that'll only clog up the thread.
  
  Lastly, I'm also putting together a standard X58 setup in a little while, but
  first I want to sort out the older systems.
  
  Oh, for those commenting about DX11 on older cards, that's absolutely
  true, which is why whenever possible I run each test in all three modes,
  ie. DX9, DX10 and DX11.
  
  Ian.
  
  PS. If there happens to be anybody in the Edinburgh area who has a card
  they'd be willing to lend me so I can add results for it, please let me know.
  You can visit and see for yourself. I'm in the Corstorphine/Clermiston area.

• medi01 - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  At least this time it doesn't make you color blind, and bar colors make sense (on most charts) unlike in AMD notebook review.

• Samus - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  ...but so does the GTX460. The 550 comes close to the 'stock' 460 when it is radically overclocked, just as the 460 can beat $200+ cards when it is radically overclocked.
  
  I appriciate the overclocking 'potential' and coverage, but ever since the eVGA GTX460 FTW review, AT has been dilluting the true nature of these products with overclocked cards carrying heavier weight in the charts than they should.
  
  Your older reviews (<2009) always had a overclock section, omiting the overclocked nature from the rest of the charts. I liked that.
  
  I just don't like seeing overclocked cards reviewed. They are limited runs and YMMV; the eVGA 460 FTW was available for less than a month after you reviewed it, and has since been replaced twice with the Superclocked, and now the Superclocked Extreme Edition, all of which has had varying GPU/BUS/MEM clocks at prices in excess of $80 over the stock cards. That's BS.

• mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  
  Actually the FTW is still easily available, I bought another two last week for a PC I'm
  building for a friend.
  
  Ian.

• Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  A lot has changed since 2009. The biggest of which is that NV and AMD have both given manufacturers more freedom in their designs, and simultaneously manufacturers have been looking to further differentiate their products beyond the cooler and price. Factory overclocks are how they're doing it - it allows them to build a card with a higher performance level for little extra cost, increasing their gross margin while filling small holes in the market.
  
  Truth be told it creates a bit of a hassle for us as this results in a different card/clock combo every $10, but clearly it's an effective strategy for the manufacturers. At the same time I get why it frustrates you guys, which is why we don't include these cards on our long run charts. But when it comes to reviewing custom cards it's going to be rare to see cards without a factory overclock - most enthusiast cards now have a factory overclock, and what the manufacturers are willing to sample.
  
  On the plus side, as mapesdhs has already noted, manufacturers are getting better about availability. These cards will never have the kind of long term availability that reference clocked cards do (largely due to the fact that it's a single supplier versus many), but many of them are available through the primary market lifetime of the card (which is to say until it's replaced by a newer GPU).

• mapesdhs - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  
  Has to be said though, I didn't expect the FTW to still be that easily available,
  but it is.
  
  However, the earlier poster is also correct that there are slightly lower clocked
  alternatives from EVGA that cost less, in one case the core/shader clocks are
  the same, just a bit slower RAM (the SSC version). Shop around, and note that
  sometimes minor differences in prices can be negated by varying shipping costs
  between suppliers. I know one company that keeps offering 'special' deals, but
  their shipping costs are so high that they're usually more expensive overall than
  alternative sources.
  
  I bought the FTWs because that's what my friend wanted, basically a replica
  of the system I built for myself.
  
  Ian.

• DrPop - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  I love this site and all the reviews are generally very good.
  However, I am at a loss as to why this and all other GPU reviewers still use aged compute benchmarks such as folding @ home, etc.
  
  Could you PLEASE start running some BOINC tests with QUALITY, optimized, MODERN code for the latest GPUs, so that the world can see the real "number crunching power" each GPU possesses?
  
  Examples of this would be DNETC on BOINC (highly optimized), or Collatz, etc.
  
  I am quite sure you will be surprised at how the computing bar graph will look - it will be very different than the graphs that come out of your current, aged compute code suite.
  
  Thank you!

• Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  It's true Dnetc is highly optimized (and I use it as a torture test because of that) but it's actually kind of a poor benchmark. It's purely compute bound to the point where cache, memory, etc have no impact. For our compute tests we want benchmarks that stress all aspects of the GPU, so that means it not only needs to be compute intensive, but memory intensive, cache sensitive, etc. Otherwise it's just a proxy for GFLOPs and a best case scenario for the VLIW5 architecture.
  
  With that said, I am completely open to suggestions. If you know of other programs that offer a decent benchmark and work on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, I'd like to hear about it. We'll be refreshing the suite in the next couple of months, so now is the time to make suggestions.

• HangFire - Tuesday, March 15, 2011 - link

  At least the new 550 is marginally faster and lower power idle than the 450. Someone buying-up from one to the other will get a small boost, and even if power demands are slightly higher, the difference is so small that they shouldn't have to buy a new power supply. If they complain they didn't get a big boost, well, buy something with a larger second digit.
  
  After all the naming shenanigans Nvidia has played in the past, they should be commended for (at least) getting the name of the card right.
  
  Memory bandwidth is a very important buying comparison for me. I only buy middle end cards with higher than 50GB/s bandwidth, and high end with more than 100GB/s. This is a form of future proofing. I know I can always turn down detail and still get the frame rates (unless it is a very poorly written game). I would settle for 98GB/s. I would not settle for 32GB/s, or some and some.
  
  Oh, yeah, still no comment from AT on intro-time Linux driver support. Why not at least ask, why give Nvidia shelter on this point?