Introduction

NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 550 Ti sets out to capture the sub-$200 market as the best option available. A huge task, in a market almost saturated with options. The price of a beer could determine what graphics card you end up buying!

NVIDIA's GeForce 550 Ti is technically a successor to the GTS 450. Its purpose is to give gamers a graphics card that lets them game at 1680x1050 and below; sub full HD resolutions.



To accomplish this task, the GTX 550 Ti is based on new 40 nm GF116 silicon, which packs 192 shader cores, and a 192-bit GDDR5 interface. 1 GB is the standard memory capacity, and is adressed on a 192-bit bus using memory chips of variable densities. A smart design change to achieve as much as 70% higher memory bandwidth than GTS 450 with its 128-bit interface.

ZOTAC has a long history of producing factory overclocked cards called "AMP! Edition", so it comes as no surprise that they sent us the GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition for our GTX 550 review. Their card offers a most complete output configuration. You have two DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort at your disposal. Clock speeds are a leading 1000 MHz core and 1100 MHz memory - no GTX 550 Ti today is faster!