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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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.