Hardware Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB Review

Nvidia goes after the low-end again with the GeFrorce GTX 550 Ti 1GB. Is it a sub-£100 wonder?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/15/nvidia-geforce-gtx-550-ti-1gb-review/1

 

Looks like a good card, especially if it's priced a shade lower than £100. Still no folding benchmarks though...

 

The GTX460 Smart Edition also known as the GTX460SE has 288 shaders and is slower than a GTX460 768MB:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Gainward/GeForce_GTX_460_SE/

 

Hmm, not so smart then? Especially as there's a full-fat Gainward card for the same price. Have updated the article, thanks for the spot.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/768m...pu-648mhz-shader-clock-1296mhz-288-cores-hdmi

 

I had a look around on Scan and even the GTX460 1GB and HD6850 1GB cards can be had for a few quid more it seems:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...hader-1400mhz-336-cores-2x-dl-dvi-i-mini-hdmi

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/1gb-...-960-stream-processors-dp-dl-dvi-i-dvi-d-hdmi

The GTX460 768MB Green does use only a single PCI-E power connector so it should be more frugal than most GTX460 cards:

http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-13688-view-Green-version-GeForce-GTX-460.html

 

This looks like a really well priced/performing card. It's benchmark results in some of the tests are only a few fps behind the excellent GTX460 1 Gb and, requiring only 1 connector should mean it sucks less socket-juice and hopefully creates less heat.

 

GTX and Ti for a speed-bumped 450? crazy branding monkeys have done it again.

in that case, why do we bother with GTX anyway? if everyone just start calling the cards by number, hopefully nvidia branding monkeys will see some sense.

 

I wonder why anyone would bother with this card. Get a 460 on the second hand market, save yourself some money, buy fans with that money.

 

Any chance of a bad company 2 benchmark using direct x 10 and comparing the results to direct x 10? Just out of curiosity...

 

Would be a nice,cheap upgrade/replacement for my Radeon 4850 i suppose..

 

well, here in the states, newegg has them at $150 plus about $5 for shipping. you can get a MSI 768 mb gtx 460 twin frozr for $150 and free shipping plus a $20 MIR. the 1GB cards are $30 more, but alot of them have a $30 MIR...looks like the price point needs to adjust a bit. it will, it's just the new release. nom on some noobie uninformed dollars...that reminds me...wonder how shau is doing? hope he doesnt swap out his rma for this...

 

So are "El-Cheapo" 1920x1020 monitors, but you refuse to test/recommend those

 

because those monitors are bad for your eyes.

i'd love to see a monitor terms explained feature, you can even entrust GoodBytes to write it if BT staff are busy. hopefully there will be less "which LED monitor" threads.

 

Dear nVidia
Please stop changing your naming scheme every two days. That will make it easier for people to understand where each card slots into your lineup, and thus we will be more likely to give you money. Complex, ever shifting naming schemes just put people off the entire range of cards, especially us enthusiasts, who don't just spend money on your cards, but also advise other people what to spend their money on.
Come on nVidia, I'm sure you resort to using shorthand names around the office, why not just pick one simple naming scheme (eg bigger numbers == better) and stick to it eh?
Signed
half the bloody internet.

 

Dissatisfied with the article -

1. Very few games
2. The graphs were not labelled to show which card(Zotac or KFA) was being used.
3. Only one of the cards was tested. What about the other one?
4. If you are linking to retailer websites, I would prefer it to redirect the reader to the GTX 550Ti page.
5. No noise tesing?

 

Where did the price estimate of £100 come from?

On Scan right now they list from £112 to £149 - hardly value for money when compared to the GTX 460.

 

Anandtech have a very interesting write up about this cards interesting use of Memory bandwidth vs capacity.

Essentially it is a 1GB card running on a 192bit memory interface which means one of the memory controllers is running with a abnormal amount of memory

1st controller - 2 x 1Gb on 2x 32bit channel
2nd controller - 2 x 1Gb on 2x 32bit channel
3rd controller - 2 x 2Gb on 2 x 32bit channel.

Given that memory is normally balanced across the memory channels (thus allowing easier allocation) it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the card under memory bandwidth limited scenarios.

Anand mused that the the card may be using some for of flex interleaving whereby some of the calls will be split across the 3 channels whilst other will be limited to the remaning capacity on the third controller (the first two will always run out first). Essentially you would have a card that has ~ 98.5GB/s memory bandwidth for the first 768MB of memory and then 32.8GB/s for the remaining 256MB of memory.

Link to the full article:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4221/nvidias-gtx-550-ti-coming-up-short-at-150/2

Looking at the performance figures (over at anand and here) it does look like a gimped card that should have been launched back when the GTS450 was first out to be remotely competitive (in other words this is what the GTS450 should have been). The GTX460 SE should have been called the GTX550 TI or something like that.

 

Yeah, the retail source wasn't very good apparently! They are on average £130 which is quite frankly too much! £100 would have been a very tempting upgrade from my GTS450 for very little money, but not for that much

 

Comes in at the same price as the HD6850 which stomps it across the board, nvidia failed even worse on this one then the GTS450.

Add in ridiculously bad power consumption and nvidia has another low-end failcard on their hands. It will still sell in tonnes tho due to the extremely powerful nvidia GTX branding, fanboy wars in 3........2.........1.........

 

1 - It's the same number of games we've been using for at least the last year, if not two.
2 - As usual, we've graphed the stock-speed card (by down-clocking the Zotac to stock speeds in this case) as this is more useful information. This is what we always do for launch articles and the graph label 'Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB' should be clear enough that this is the performance of a bog-standard, normal, stock-speed GTX 550 Ti 1GB.
3 - Addressed above, but I'll add that the cards arrived a bit late to do the full testing treatment for the launch given that we also needed to re-test the comparison cards.
4 - We didn't have this information pre-launch (as the pages weren't live), but we wanted to let our readers know which of their favourite etailers you can expect stock of these cards at. Surely this is preferable to having no buying information at all?
5 - As mentioned on the Performance Analysis page, each GTX 550 Ti card is likely to different.

The estimate came from Nvidia, and was used in good faith. It's not unusual for prices to vary from MSRP, but even our retailer source indicated that the price would be £90-125 so that's what we worked from when forming our conclusions.