A Closer Look

For optimal heat transfer the cooler on ASUS' GTX 550 Ti Direct CU uses two heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. Unfortunately ASUS has not addressed a fan motor limitation that requires a certain minimum RPM at all times which results in increased noise.


The card requires a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector, which is just enough to handle the card.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. There are two densities of memory chips, four 1 Gbit (128 MB), and two 2 Gbit (256 MB), to populate the 192-bit wide memory interface, and achieve 1024 MB of total memory. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


ASUS has rebranded the voltage controller on their card, I think it is a controller similar to the ONSemi chip uses on other designs. It offers voltage control via VID exposed through NVIDIA's driver.


NVIDIA's GeForce 116 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF 106 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption.