This video marks the launch of a couple of interesting things. So, this is the
MSI GTX 550Ti or TAI, which is a 1 gig
brand new video card, brand new GPU from NVIDIA, and it also marks the
introduction of the Cyclone 2. So, the
Cyclone cooler was incredibly popular,
still is incredibly popular on the LA previous generation cards from MSI, but
it looks like they've made some improvements to it, and they've made enough improvements to call it an
upgraded Cyclone 2. So, let's find out what's up with the Cyclone 2 once we get
things opened up. First of all, this is an OC edition card, so that means it is
factory overclocked. It is ready for 3D Mark 11, which is one way of saying it
is a DirectX11 card. It's compatible with MSI Afterburner, which is awesome.
It's overclocking utility for monitoring temps, all that good stuff. It supports
CUDA, SLI, PhysX, 3D Vision, as well as
NVIDIA Surround if you run two of them together. It uses MSI's military class
concept, including solidstate chokes and solid caps for no coil wine and up to 10
years lifetime. We've also got a 3-year warranty in the USA and Canada. Oh, and
here's one interesting difference between the Cyclone and the Cyclone 2.
The propeller blade now allows for up to 20% more air flow.
Interesting. Yes. Okay. What do we got in here? Okay. More of the same
stuff, right? Oh, here's some specs on the Cyclone 2. Here we go. So, 9 cm PWM
fan up to 40% more air flow to cool down the GPU memory and power modules all at
once. Multiple heat pipes. So, it has it looks like two heat pipes through the uh
window there, though it's hard to say yet. Hybrid heat sink design. So, it
combines aluminum extrusion, heat pipes, and fins for maximum cooling.
Nickelplated copper base rounded design.
Okay. Oh, prevents dust accumulation. Okay, I did not know that. Ultimate low
noise. Yes, that I knew. The cyclones of the our original Cyclone was a very very
uh low noise cooler. And propeller blade. So that provides up to 20% more
air flow versus a traditional design. It's based on the same thermal mode with
the same RPM. Interesting. Okay, so let's go ahead and get this box opened
up. Don't see anything particularly fascinating on the back. Uh see, it's a
PCI Express 16X card. It requires a
minimum 400 watt greater system power supply with a minimum 12vt current
rating of 24 amps. And everything else on there is fairly
irrelevant. Yeah. All right. This is an interesting way of
packing the card. I don't know if this is a retail card, just so you guys know.
So, I I'm not quite sure if the retail cards will come like this. This is a uh
a tech tips card, but there you go. It is. Well, you know what? Look, okay,
let's not fault them for their methods. Let's let's evaluate based on what was
the objective and did they achieve it. The objective was keep the card in place
and protect it during shipping and they did achieve it, however inelegantly. All
right, let's look at the accessories. We've got a two Molex to single six pin
PCIe power adapter. We've got one of them little mini HDMI to full size HDMI
adapters. That could be useful as very few TVs have a native mini HDMI cable.
We've got a DVI to VGA adapter, which by the way, I know I'm always knocking the
DVI to VGA adapter, but for this particular card, very appropriate
because you may have an older VGA monitor that you would want to run off
this card because it's low res and this
card is going to be optimized for 1680x
1050 or below. That's the kind of price point that this card exists in. So, hold
on. Let's see if we got anything else down here. Yes, we do. MSI hides their
driver CD since they know that you should probably not use it. You should
throw it away and download the latest off the NVIDIA website. And we've also
got a little guide for something. Yeah.
Okay. And then a quick users guide which basically shows you how to install a
PCIe card. But if you watch Linus Tech Tips, then you probably already know
that because I have covered that in the past. All right. So, what I'm going to
do is I'm just going to flip this over and that'll make a nice little platform
for my card. and let's get the 560 TI or
TI onto the platform so we can check it
out. All right, so the first thing the most noticeable thing about this about
this new Cyclone 2 cooler to me is that
they've added like a little like blade style shroudy thing on it. So each one
of these actually kind of looks like the like the blade of a curved sword or
something like that. And I think that's the effect they're going for cuz they got like these little uh these little
jaggy things here, right there, which would be pretty nasty if you were
cutting someone open with them. So that's uh it's a very aggressive look to
the cooler itself. The overall design of it looks fairly similar to the original
Cyclone and in that it has the uh the normal flower heat sink here. It's got
the heat pipes and then those heat pipes are used to carry heat out to this nice
dense fin array. So, what that means is we're not wasting any of the cooling
capacity of this fan. So, the any air
that's blown downward is going to be cooling the GPU through the aluminum
fins here. And any air that is blown out to the side is going to be cooling the
GPU because the heat pipes are going to be carrying the heat up to these fins.
And then it can carry the heat out this way, out this way, and in every which
way. MSI over the reference design has
also added a couple other things. They've actually got a heat sink here on
the voltage regulators. And you're going to see that that's going to get a ton of
air flow from this fan. When it spins, it'll just be blowing over those heat
sinks. I don't think we'll have to worry about those running warm at all. And
they've also added a little stiffening plate. So, this is interesting. You can
see right here, a little MSI branded plate. And it looks like what that's for
is just to hold the PCB rigid when you've got it installed in your case
because it's not really connected to anything else. And that's something that
I've really felt should be included with
more graphics cards.
Sorry. Especially as they start to get heavier and
heavier. All right, let's start taking off these little protective covers.
off the DVI port. It's off the SLI connector, off the mini HDMI. There we
go. Okay. So, another thing I wanted to point out about this card right here is
that you can see that some of the pins on the PCI Express connector appear to
be missing. This is by design. This is not a defect in your card. These are
unnecessary for performance and bandwidth, and NVIDIA has deemed them to
be perfectly fine to remove. The card is
still PCI Express compliant, so you don't have to worry about any motherboard compatibility issues or
anything like that. The Cyclone 2 fan is
actually a four pin PWM controlled fan. And uh I don't know what the noise
characteristics of it are like, but if it's anything like the old one, it's probably a pretty pretty
dec. Here we've got a six pin PCI Express power connector. That's all
we're going to need as far as external power goes for the GTX 550 TI or TI. On
the back of the card, we actually see one of the cooler innovations that
NVIDIA has brought about with the GTX 550 TI. They've actually given their
board partners the capability of mixing
and matching different capacities of memory on the card. So, I'm not sure
which ones are which, but my guess would be that these four are all totaling up
to uh 512 megs and these two together
are 512 megs to give us our 1 gig capacity. Because the 550 Tai has a
192bit memory interface, which is significantly more than any other
previous generation card in this price bracket, but it only has six memory
modules. So, how does it have a 1 gig capacity, which would imply that it
would have to have either four or eight memory modules? Well, it's because
they're mixing and matching the capacities to give us that extra
bandwidth, but also that extra that nice
round even capacity. So, that's a pretty neat thing that NVIDIA has brought about
on this generation of cards. Here at the back, we find something we're pretty
used to seeing on MSI cards and NVIDIA cards in general. We've got two DVI
ports, one HDM, one mini HDMI port. And these, only two of these three can be
used at any given time. If you do run two 550 ties, you can run three monitors
off of the two cards together. But for an individual card, you're either using
DVI DVI, DVI Mini HDMI, or DVI Mini
HDMI. We've also got our typical MSI branded exhaust port here. Although with
Cyclone cooler, not a whole lot of the exhaust is going to be going to the
outside of the case anyhow due to the design of the cooler. The 550 is a
fairly um low power consumption, low
heat out heat output card though, so I wouldn't worry too much about the
overall case temperatures being affected by having the exhaust going out into
your case. The SLI connector is up
here. And as you can see, there's only one of
them. So, that's going to support two-way SLI, but not 3-way or 4-way SLI.
I mean, really, honestly, those features would be pretty unnecessary on a card at
this price point. Anyway, so, thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
look at the GeForce GTX 550 Ti from MSI
featuring the Cyclone 2 cooler. Don't
forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.