Now, this is something I've never had the pleasure of unboxing before. This is
an NVIDIA branded GeForce GTX. It is a
reference card, so it has a completely
black box all on the outside. It's
completely black.
Better go clean my lens. There. That's better. Okay. So, what we want I want to
do is start opening this thing up.
It's got a nice uh glossy branding
finish on it to go with the overall matte black box. You can see here
something I've never seen on a graphics card box before and that is designed and
built by NVIDIA. So, we're going to go ahead open this guy up. We find a white
inside to the box. All right. Now, here's something. Dear valued editor,
uh something something. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this
off because I don't know how much of that is confidential, but uh yeah. Okay.
So, it's telling me a few different things. first of all that this is equipped with 192 CUDA cores and 192-bit
GDR uh GDDDR5 memory interface which is actually
pretty cool because it allows the board partners to mix and match the densities
of the memory modules they're putting on so that they can achieve a 1 gig
capacity without an even memory bandwidth interface. So that's pretty
cool. um has faster clock speeds over
the GTS 450, its younger brother, and it
has a little list of what all is going to be included in here. So, first we got some stickers. And these are nice
stickers. I actually really like these. There's a an You can see there's a bit
of a H. It's hard to see that in the camera, but there's a pale There we go.
There we go. There's an NVIDIA next to that little logo. We got some NVIDIA
logos. We got one of their NVIDIA characters and a GeForce GTX sticker.
Very nice. Okay, we have a driver disc,
which is empty. So, this is just a reference package that does not contain
a driver disc because it shipped out before there was a driver disc available
for this particular card. Here's where some accessories would go if there were
any included, I suppose. So, let's go ahead and pull that out. All right, I've
got a GTX 550 Ti reviewer guide, which
is highly confidential, and you guys won't be looking at that.
And then, what do we have down here? We've got a video card, which I will
assume at this point based on the evidence I've seen thus far is a GeForce
GTX 550. And then we have nothing underneath. So, this is a retail boxed
card that doesn't quite contain a full retail package. Oh, and then thank you
for buying in a bunch of different languages. Very nice. Nice touch. Okay,
so let's close up the box and we'll use that to look at the video card itself.
All right. So, here it is. This is the
GTX 550 Ti. It features a very similar
look to the 560Ti reference design card.
That is the central fan with a flower
style heatsink. So, if I spin this, you can see the heat sink a little bit
better. And let me see if it's got any heat pipes going on on there. Going to
have to try and get a different angle. No, it looks like this one, unlike the 560Ti, does not require a heat pipe
cooler for optimal performance. So, NVIDIA has opted just for a standard
flower heat sink cooler. You can see the shroud is recessed a little bit just
like the 560Ti. So, the fan actually sticks up a little bit above the top of
the shroud. So, one of the things that it's likely that this does is if you're
in an SLI configuration and your cards are close together, it should give your
fan a little bit more breathing room to pull in air around it and make sure the
card stays adequately cool. You can see something here that we've actually seen
in the past from NVIDIA cards and that not all the PCIe pins are present on the
bottom connector. That doesn't matter. Actually, all that is is uh they've
removed some of the unnecessary pins that they don't need. It will not affect
performance or the bandwidth available to your card in any way, shape, or form.
You can also tell this is an engineering sample card by the fact that the PCI
Express lock is not broken off here. So, this card will not lock into a slot. It
has a little piece here that will prevent it from doing so, so it can be easily removed by reviewers. All right,
we've got an SLI connector. So, this card is SLI ready, but that is two-way
SLI and not three-way SLI, just so you
guys are aware because it's only got a single connector. That means it's only
compatible with two-way SLI. On the back, we find the connectors that we're
getting pretty used to seeing. We've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI
connectors. Although, please do note you can only use two of any any two of these
three connectors at any given time. If you do install two cards in your system,
then you can run three monitors off of the two cards together to run NVIDIA
surround with up to three monitors. Here on the back, you see one of the cool
things I was talking about before. 1 2 3 4 5 six memory modules, but it's a 1 gig
card. So NVIDIA very cleverly has
allowed their partners to use four lower density memory modules and two higher
density ones to achieve the five to achieve the 1 gig memory capacity.
Otherwise we'd be stuck with one of those odd capacities like we've seen on
previous NVIDIA cards like 768 or uh
1280. You know those those sort of oddball memory capacities but NVIDIA has
engineered the card to have excellent memory bandwidth. So they've increased
it from 128 bit to 192bit, but they've
also managed to keep a nice round number on the memory capacity. So there you go.
That's kind of cool. It also helps the board partners achieve slightly lower
board costs by using these lower density chips to to get up to that capacity. So
it really is a win-winwin for everyone. The consumer gets more bandwidth, gets
more memory, and the board partners save on some cost. And NVIDIA's engineers are
clearly pretty clever right about now. So right here we've got a PCI Express 6
pin connector. So that is the only external power that this card requires.
We can also clearly see the four pin PWM fan connector for that fan for the heat
sink. We can also see the power delivery in there. So fairly basic. Uh there's no
active cooling on the power. Well, okay, there's act. Okay, there's no heat sinks
on the power circuitry, but what we do have is a fair amount of air flow is
going to be coming from the fan and going over the power connect or the
power circuitry because there's absolutely nothing restricting the air
flow out this way. So, what that means is that the GTX 550Ti is going to be a
fairly internal exhaust card cuz you can see here right along the entire top of
the shroud, there's a fairly substantial gap that's going to allow air to come
out this way, cool these memory chips, cool anything up here along the card.
Uh, same thing along the bottom. You're going to see there's a fairly substantial gap there. So, while we're
going to be exhausting some of the air out of the back plate, most of it is
going to be coming out the top, the bottom, and the back of the card. Like
maybe 20% of it is going to be externally exhausted. Now, this isn't
going to be a very hot running card, so I don't think that's going to be a huge
problem for you. Um, one last thing I should probably go over before we end
here is that it does support all of the usual NVIDIA technology. So, we've got
CUDA, 3D Vision, I already mentioned SLI, already mentioned NVIDIA Surround,
but all of that good stuff is supported. This is a gaming grade card. It's
targeted at people who are playing at 1680x 1050 or lower. So, don't expect to
be, you know, grabbing one of these if you're running on a huge 30-in monitor
or anything like that. But, it is a gaming grade sort of a uh entrylevel
performance grade card. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
GeForce GTX 550Ti or Tai if you prefer.
Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and
other computer videos. Irk, I forgot to
mention Physex, and I also wanted to mention the just the clock speeds of
this particular card. So, it's clocked at 900 MHz, which is substantially
higher than the old GTS 450, but the actual power consumption of the card has
only gone up slightly. So, I'm really looking forward to getting this guy on
the test bench. Once again, don't forget to subscribe.