Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC Graphics Card Review

It is a fact that most of us PC hardware enthusiasts are so concerned with what is happening at the high end of the graphics card market, that lower end cards like the GTX550 get forgotten among the more outrageously powerful, and sometimes outrageously expensive, cards out there. However, the lower end cards are what sell the best to the mainstream users who want to game without spending £200 on a top end card, but are clever enough not to opt for a console! More importantly though, the lower power found in these cards give manufacturers such as GIGABYTE the ability to do some amazing things with them, such as silent cooling and high overclocks. This is exactly what a buyer is looking for and appears to be exactly what GIGABYTE is offering- we will see how it does this later on.

The ability for manufacturers to customise cards with the GTX 550 Ti GPU is evident by just looking at a few examples. Many different USPs are created to appeal to different users who may be looking for good aesthetics or just plain overclocking performance. So every manufacturer is looking to set itself aside from the competition.

The GTX 550 Ti directly competes with a few existing cards on the market, most notably the GTX 460 which, after about a year after release, is still the king of the sub-£150 cards. nVidia will be competing with a few of it’s own GPUs as well as ATI’s HD5770 which is the GTX 550 Ti’s most direct competitor. So I assume nVidia will be aiming to knock the 5770 off it’s throne as the best budget card which it has held for about a year and a half. All-in-all there is a lot of competition both for nVidia against other GPUs, and GIGABYTE against it’s competitor manufacturers. So, I think we have given you enough background for this card, it’s time to take a look!

Specifications
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* The entire materials provided herein are for reference only. GIGABYTE reserves the right to modify or revise the content at anytime without prior notice.
* Advertised performance is based on maximum theoretical interface values from respective Chipset vendors or organization who defined the interface specification. Actual performance may vary by system configuration.
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* Due to standard PC architecture, a certain amount of memory is reserved for system usage and therefore the actual memory size is less than the stated amount.