A Closer Look

Palit's cooler is fairly simple thanks to the low heat output of the GTX 550 GPU. It can handle the card without copper baseplate or fancy heatpipes.


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).


As voltage controller a cost efficient ONSemi NCP5395 is used, it provides basic voltage control using VID via 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.