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!

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Documentation
• PCI-Express Power Cable
• DVI Adapter

The Card

ZOTAC has branded their card design in a nice orange with black PCB that transports the company identity very nicely.


Like all other GTX 550 boards, the GTX 550 requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort. Unlike AMD's latest GPUs, the output logic design is not as flexible. On AMD cards vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links), on NVIDIA, you are fixed to two DVI outputs and one HDMI/DP in addition to that. NVIDIA confirmed that you can use only two displays at the same time, so for a three monitor setup you would need two cards.

NVIDIA has included an HDMI sound device inside their GPU which does away with the requirement of connecting an external audio source to the card for HDMI audio. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.3a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit. NVIDIA also claims full support for the 3D portion of the HDMI 1.4 specification which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-Ray titles shipping with support for 3D output.


You may combine up to two GTX 550 Ti cards of any model from any vendor in SLI.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.