Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC Graphics Card Review

An Even Closer Look
GIGABYTE, on this occasion, has stuck to nVIDIA’s reference PCB design which keeps down cost. It is a bit of a shame that GIGABYTE did not put any of their PCB design expertise on this particular card, although the PCB is already short, efficiently laid out and easy to cool.

So to design their own PCB would only have increased manufacturing cost and not have achieved any noticeable gain.

However, GIGABYTE blessed this card with their ‘Ultra Durable’ technology. This card features 2oz copper PCB which is a feature I have also had the pleasure to use on their motherboards. It is possibly one of the best innovations in component PCB manufacturing which I would like to see as an industry standard. This makes the PCB noticeably stronger which gives you plenty of assurance that you are not going to damage your card when installing or removing, it is also very important on long cards as it gives it the rigidity it needs to prevent it flexing over time. On a sidenote, this feature is particularly reassuring when you are pushing RAM modules into their housing which always seems to require a dangerous amount of force! Also on this card you can find Japanese solid capacitors and metal ferrite core chokes which ensure longevity and constant high-performance.

We also find ‘tier-1′ quality RAM which also promotes longevity and increases performance. These features are not a gimmick like many other ‘features’ you find advertised on other cards, these are noticeable and practical benefits that I really enjoy on both this card and my motherboard. The card also features a blue PCB which is a little like Marmite- you either love it or you hate it. If you have a GIGABYTE motherboard that has a blue PCB or if you have a blue colour theme in your case then this will look great, however if you are using a board such as an ROG one, this is going to stand out a little. Take it into consideration if you are as pernickety about colour schemes and case design as I am!

Moving on to the bottom of the card we can see where GIGABYTE has invested the extra £10 you will be paying over the standard GTX 550 price- the cooler. As mentioned earlier, the cooler features a very large flower style cooler reminiscent of Intel’s stock cooler prior to the new heatpipe coolers, only about twice as big! We have seen heatpipe coolers for the GTX 550, however they are simply overkill and will once again increase cost with no real benefit, another example of GIGABYTE balancing performance with price. This heatsink has a copper centre for moving the heat away from the GPU as quickly as possible before it is passed to the aluminium mass to dissipate the heat into the air. The heatsink is cooled by a large 10cm fan that is designed to cool the card without needing large RPMs to do so which reduces noise produced by the card. This seems to work well as adding this card to my system reduced overall system noise, and when I ran the case without a graphics card at all, I could not tell the difference between having this card in and running the system without a card. In addition, during the week the card was in my case, there was absolutely no trace of dust buildup in the heatsink. Although a week is not a long time, when you have a case as dusty as mine you expect some amount of dust to be found on the heatsink! This cooler will also allow you to overclock the card to 1GHz if you really felt the need with no heat issues, as long as your GPU can handle the increased voltage.

As effective as the cooler is, I would have liked to have seen the card have some sort of shroud at the side. Although the card looks great from the bottom, you never see that part in a standard, so it would have been nice to have seen a shroud on the side that could have some kind of GIGABYTE branding or design on to make the card more appealing to those with a windowed side panel. This is of course, only a minor criticism of this fantastic cooler.