GeForce GTX 550 Ti Graphics Card

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After the GTX 560 Ti is therefore now the GeForce GTX 550 Ti which completes the range nVIDIA. As might be expected, the GTX 550 Ti is positioned below the 560 Ti, but despite its name it is more like a GTS 450 to the latter. The last baby chameleon reproduces the same basic effect in settling for a little boost. We thus find the GF106 (this time named GF106-400), the 1.17 million transistors, the 192 cores, 32 texture units, or the 1024 MB of GDDR5, but POR spend 16 to 24 with a 192bit memory bus cons for a 128bit GTS 450. In addition, the frequencies are adjusted upwards and GF106-400 now runs at 900 MHz and shaders at 1800 MHz for the memory to 1025 MHz.

Six months after the arrival of the GeForce GTS 450 on the market, Nvidia has launched its successor: the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. This new graphics card is designed around the GF116, a revised version of the GF106. The chip still has 192 stream processors. It is accompanied by 1024MB of GDDR5, which take place on a 192-bit memory bus. The firm had a chameleon change its memory controller, and one will find on the printed circuit of this graphics card a new configuration with four bullets and two 128 MB chips of 256 MB Frequencies of Ti GTX 550 is 900 MHz heart, 1800 MHz shader and 1025 MHz memory.

With increasing frequency GPU, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti shows a gain of computational power of 15% compared to the GeForce GTS 450 and takes the bus to see a wider memory bandwidth up no less than 70%. The graphics card is much faster than the GeForce GTS 450, and thus render between this place and the GeForce GTX successful 460th At the same time would like to Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti with the Radeon HD 5770, AMD beat what the GeForce GTS has been denied 450.h Meanwhile, AMD has migrated its product range of the HD5000 series for HD6000 series. Still in the desktop product portfolio is the Radeon HD 5750 and HD 5770, in the OEM market, the HD 5770, however, already renamed the Radeon HD 6770th. Also, NVIDIA is now presented piece by piece its new GeForce GTX 500-series, which replaces gradually the GTX 400 series.

As a direct opponent was AMD's Radeon HD 5700-series and in particular picked out the HD 5770/6770. With the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti will be positioned in price and performance between the HD 5770 and HD 6850th there are, however, a special feature for NVIDIA sampled the press this time not with a reference implementation, but left the task to the partners. Background, the fact that the partners are clearly present from the start its own board creations that go in most cases, with higher clock rates at the start, as provided for NVIDIA, this is typical for a GTX 550 Ti. In addition, NVIDIA is also why the day before the official presentation of which distances one from the utterance. This is NVIDIA to follow at the discretion of the Board and partners must be made to individual graphics cards.

Top Highlights :

Get incredibly detailed game world in DirectX 11 thanks to the power of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti! With performance up to 6 times higher compared to previous generations 1, turn your PC into a true gaming machine of new generation.

Extreme Performance : Equip your PC with a GPU six times more efficient compared to previous generations 1. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti offers the power needed to enjoy the hottest games, like Crysis 2 or Duke Nukem Forever.

DirectX 11 graphics : The GeForce GTX 550 Ti delivers a powerful geometric processing DirectX 11 to 2.5 times higher compared to the competition 2. Enjoy an extraordinary visual quality in the best games like Crysis DirectX 11 2, Civilization 2 and HAWX V.

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Features :

Supports Microsoft DirectX 11 : GPUs DirectX 11 with Shader Model 5.0, were designed to deliver ultra-high performance with new features including tessellation graph unavoidable accelerated by the GPU.

NVIDIA PhysX : Full support for NVIDIA PhysX technology enables whole new physical interactions in order to gain experience more dynamic and realistic with GeForce.

Compatibility NVIDIA Vision 3D : GPUs support NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision and offer experience incredibly immersive stereoscopic 3D on PC. Combination of wireless glasses of high technology and a software solution for advanced 3D Vision automatically converts hundreds of PC games in stereoscopic 3D. In addition, watch 3D movies and digital photos in stunning 3D and interactive experience.

Compatibility NVIDIA Vision 3D Surround : With the power of NVIDIA SLI and NVIDIA 3D Vision, expand your games up to three displays with 3D stereo for the ultimate gaming experience. NVIDIA Surround also allows you to play on three screens simultaneously, even if your monitors do not support stereoscopic 3D.

NVIDIA SLI : NVIDIA SLI technology, at the forefront of the industry, provides remarkable performance schedule by implementing 3-way AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering) for the solution of game's most powerful Windows 7 with effective and innovative pilot .

NVIDIA CUDA : NVIDIA CUDA harnesses the power of the GPU's processing cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks such as video encoding, to provide much better performance than the capacity of traditional CPUs. 32x Anti-aliasing Technology. Lightning fast, high quality anti-aliasing at sampling rates up to 32x eliminates jagged edges.

NVIDIA PureVideo HD : This combination of acceleration for decoding high-definition video post-processing and offers unparalleled picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color and precise scaling of the image for movies and video.

Supports PCI Express 2.0 : The new bus architecture PCI Express 2.0 has the highest flow rates to cope with 3D games and applications more greedy, while ensuring backward compatibility with PCI Express motherboards available.
Supports dual-link DVI : Can manage the biggest flat screen and more specific industry (with a maximum resolution of 2560x1600) with full HDCP support.

HDMI 1.4a Support : Compatibility with HDMI 1.4a including support GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D standards support xvColor and Deep Color HDMI and digital surround sound 7.1.

GF116

The GF116 is that the GF106 GF114 GF104 is. In other words, it is not a new GPU but a new revision of the chip designed to reduce leakage currents and to facilitate the increase in frequency. As a reminder, here is an outline of the internal architecture of the different GPUs that take place in the GeForce 400 and 500. The GF106/116 is roughly half a GF104/114, except that it has a 192-bit memory bus 256-bit cons for her big brother. While the GeForce GTS 450 was just a memory bus castrated at 128 bits, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti advantage of the full 192-bit bus and yet displays an equivalent amount of memory to 1 GB How possible? In principle a 192-bit memory bus should induce a video memory of 768 MB or 1.5 GB.

Nvidia says here have slightly reworked his memory controller to support a variable density memory. GPUs are working more or less all with one or more 64-bit memory controllers. In the case of GF116, 3 of these controllers is thus share access to video memory. The novelty comes from the fact that it is now possible to use chips with different densities for each controller. Here is the typical configuration of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 550 and Ti 4 embeds memory chips of 128 MB and 2 other chips of 256 MB In practice, the GPU has a memory and "fast" of 768 MB, available in 192-bit memory and a "slow "additional 256 MB available in 64 bits. So we suppose it's all optimizations in software and the proper functioning of all this will depend on the ability of pilots to put the data that are most in need of priority performance in the memory space available in 192 bits.

You will notice that Nvidia has decided to review the use of suffixes and prefixes in the nomenclature of this new version. The manufacturer has informed us they intend to focus now on two brands: GeForce for entry-level GeForce GTX for the middle and upper range. The use of the suffix Ti remains unclear, but we can assume it will be reserved for larger models of each series in the event that other versions were to emerge.

Specification

This new version of the map will be based GPU GF116. With features closely resemble those of the AMD HD 6870 which is formulated based on the core Barth XT. The GF116 is equipped with 192-core CUDA with 32 texture units, the timings GPU / shader would MHz/1800 to 900 MHz. The GTX 550 Ti had 1 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, which far surpasses the GTS 450 with its 512 Mb By cons, both models use the same PCB.

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Power

The new Nvidia graphics solution displays a maximum power of 116 watts, and requires an external PCIe power connector 6 pins. The reference model, which should not be widely used, adopts a dual-slot cooler, similar to the GTX 560 Ti. With only 23 cm long, the GTX 560 Ti is relatively short. Then we regret that the two 6-pin power connectors are positioned on the bottom of the card and not on the side. With cables rigid, it should still count more than 3 cm in a box (26 cm in total) to find suitable housing.

The GF116 is well here with cool temperatures similar to those of a GeForce GTX 460.

The various components are maintained at temperatures quite correct (respectively 27 ° C and 86 ° C in 2D and 3D) with a central fan. Like the GTX 570, it is particularly quiet in 2D and 3D. In the latter case, the breath is of course audible but not disturbing. In games, the meter climbed to 320 watts. It's much better than a Radeon HD 6970 (263 W), but well above a Radeon HD 6950 (278 W). We really hope that the consumer will use 3D scaled down, like NVIDIA, AMD in future generations of graphics cards.

Memory

The GDDR5 memory operates at 4100 MHz. The TDP would be content not to exceed 110 watts. As output connectors, this latest model from NVIDIA would be equipped with two DVI and mini HDMI.

GTX 550 CPU Clock and comparison :

The GeForce GTX 550 TOP from Asus DirectCU Ti incorporates a design similar to that of the Radeon HD 6850 in the same series that we tested recently. Its PCB is of course different and shorter, but still longer than the GTS 460 and GeForce GTX 450 reference with 21cm 22.5cm cons. The footprint is similar to that of a GeForce GTX 560 Ti reference. Asus has opted for a power stage that has 4 phases dedicated to the GPU, but with no radiator.
As usual, Asus has placed a reinforcing bar on the top of the card to ensure a good rigidity to the structure because its cooler that is attached by 4 screws to the 4 corners of the GPU. As its name suggests, this cooler has 2 copper heat pipes in direct contact with the GPU. They pass through an aluminum radiator is cooled by a central fan. A design that is not done to extract the hot air out of the box, but rather to disperse without introducing too much noise.

GDDR5 memory is Hynix signed and certified to 1.25 GHz (2.5 GHz for data). As expected, we find 4 modules of 1 GB (128 MB), and 2 modules of 2 GB (256 MB) to form the memory space of 1 GB of 192-bit interfaces. Note that the back of the PCB is expected to double the memory and go to 2 GB. In terms of connectivity, Asus has opted for a DVI output, HDMI output and VGA output. One 6-pin power connector is required. TOP model required, it is overclocked: 975 MHz to 900 MHz GPU cons for reference frequencies, a gain of 8%. Memory is not overclocked by cons. From our side we could reach a maximum frequency of 1050 MHz GPU.

Compared to the GeForce GTS 450 will allow the new GTX 550 with 192 Ti CUDA cores and a clock speed of 1,800 MHz to 28 percent faster gaming experience. The 1-gigabyte memory is a 192-bit interface connected, the map itself covers two slots in the PC according to Nvidia, and requires a 400-watt power supply as a minimum.

Conclusion

NVIDIA has formalized its GeForce GTX 550 Ti, a map-based graphics chipset GF116 clocked at 900 MHz and 192 boarding CUDA cores running at 1800 MHz, and 32 texture units and 24 ROPs. The design of the GTX 550 Ti evolves, however, not compared to the GTS 450. We thus find a dual-slot cooling, a PCB with a length of 210 mm, a power connector PCI-Express 6-pin and DVI (x2) and HDMI 1.4. The manufacturer finally announces a recommended retail price of 149 dollars, which puts the

GeForce GTX 550 Ti against the Radeon HD 6850. In all cases, performance is truly at the appointment. The level is sufficient to play with all options enabled in securities greedy. Future hits should not pose any problems either. In the end, we are very satisfied with this model that shows - once again on this series - excellent performance and perfect control of noise pollution