NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB Reference Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,642 words · ~8 min read
0:00
Now, this is something I've never had the pleasure of unboxing before. This is
0:04
an NVIDIA branded GeForce GTX. It is a
0:08
reference card, so it has a completely
0:12
black box all on the outside. It's
0:16
completely black.
0:19
Better go clean my lens. There. That's better. Okay. So, what we want I want to
0:23
do is start opening this thing up.
0:26
It's got a nice uh glossy branding
0:30
finish on it to go with the overall matte black box. You can see here
0:35
something I've never seen on a graphics card box before and that is designed and
0:39
built by NVIDIA. So, we're going to go ahead open this guy up. We find a white
0:45
inside to the box. All right. Now, here's something. Dear valued editor,
0:51
uh something something. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this
0:56
off because I don't know how much of that is confidential, but uh yeah. Okay.
1:01
So, it's telling me a few different things. first of all that this is equipped with 192 CUDA cores and 192-bit
1:07
GDR uh GDDDR5 memory interface which is actually
1:12
pretty cool because it allows the board partners to mix and match the densities
1:15
of the memory modules they're putting on so that they can achieve a 1 gig
1:20
capacity without an even memory bandwidth interface. So that's pretty
1:25
cool. um has faster clock speeds over
1:28
the GTS 450, its younger brother, and it
1:32
has a little list of what all is going to be included in here. So, first we got some stickers. And these are nice
1:37
stickers. I actually really like these. There's a an You can see there's a bit
1:40
of a H. It's hard to see that in the camera, but there's a pale There we go.
1:44
There we go. There's an NVIDIA next to that little logo. We got some NVIDIA
1:48
logos. We got one of their NVIDIA characters and a GeForce GTX sticker.
1:52
Very nice. Okay, we have a driver disc,
1:56
which is empty. So, this is just a reference package that does not contain
2:00
a driver disc because it shipped out before there was a driver disc available
2:04
for this particular card. Here's where some accessories would go if there were
2:08
any included, I suppose. So, let's go ahead and pull that out. All right, I've
2:11
got a GTX 550 Ti reviewer guide, which
2:14
is highly confidential, and you guys won't be looking at that.
2:18
And then, what do we have down here? We've got a video card, which I will
2:23
assume at this point based on the evidence I've seen thus far is a GeForce
2:28
GTX 550. And then we have nothing underneath. So, this is a retail boxed
2:33
card that doesn't quite contain a full retail package. Oh, and then thank you
2:37
for buying in a bunch of different languages. Very nice. Nice touch. Okay,
2:41
so let's close up the box and we'll use that to look at the video card itself.
2:49
All right. So, here it is. This is the
2:52
GTX 550 Ti. It features a very similar
2:57
look to the 560Ti reference design card.
3:01
That is the central fan with a flower
3:04
style heatsink. So, if I spin this, you can see the heat sink a little bit
3:07
better. And let me see if it's got any heat pipes going on on there. Going to
3:12
have to try and get a different angle. No, it looks like this one, unlike the 560Ti, does not require a heat pipe
3:17
cooler for optimal performance. So, NVIDIA has opted just for a standard
3:22
flower heat sink cooler. You can see the shroud is recessed a little bit just
3:27
like the 560Ti. So, the fan actually sticks up a little bit above the top of
3:32
the shroud. So, one of the things that it's likely that this does is if you're
3:36
in an SLI configuration and your cards are close together, it should give your
3:40
fan a little bit more breathing room to pull in air around it and make sure the
3:44
card stays adequately cool. You can see something here that we've actually seen
3:48
in the past from NVIDIA cards and that not all the PCIe pins are present on the
3:53
bottom connector. That doesn't matter. Actually, all that is is uh they've
3:59
removed some of the unnecessary pins that they don't need. It will not affect
4:02
performance or the bandwidth available to your card in any way, shape, or form.
4:08
You can also tell this is an engineering sample card by the fact that the PCI
4:11
Express lock is not broken off here. So, this card will not lock into a slot. It
4:17
has a little piece here that will prevent it from doing so, so it can be easily removed by reviewers. All right,
4:22
we've got an SLI connector. So, this card is SLI ready, but that is two-way
4:27
SLI and not three-way SLI, just so you
4:31
guys are aware because it's only got a single connector. That means it's only
4:34
compatible with two-way SLI. On the back, we find the connectors that we're
4:38
getting pretty used to seeing. We've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI
4:42
connectors. Although, please do note you can only use two of any any two of these
4:47
three connectors at any given time. If you do install two cards in your system,
4:50
then you can run three monitors off of the two cards together to run NVIDIA
4:56
surround with up to three monitors. Here on the back, you see one of the cool
5:00
things I was talking about before. 1 2 3 4 5 six memory modules, but it's a 1 gig
5:06
card. So NVIDIA very cleverly has
5:09
allowed their partners to use four lower density memory modules and two higher
5:15
density ones to achieve the five to achieve the 1 gig memory capacity.
5:20
Otherwise we'd be stuck with one of those odd capacities like we've seen on
5:23
previous NVIDIA cards like 768 or uh
5:27
1280. You know those those sort of oddball memory capacities but NVIDIA has
5:32
engineered the card to have excellent memory bandwidth. So they've increased
5:36
it from 128 bit to 192bit, but they've
5:39
also managed to keep a nice round number on the memory capacity. So there you go.
5:43
That's kind of cool. It also helps the board partners achieve slightly lower
5:47
board costs by using these lower density chips to to get up to that capacity. So
5:51
it really is a win-winwin for everyone. The consumer gets more bandwidth, gets
5:55
more memory, and the board partners save on some cost. And NVIDIA's engineers are
5:59
clearly pretty clever right about now. So right here we've got a PCI Express 6
6:04
pin connector. So that is the only external power that this card requires.
6:07
We can also clearly see the four pin PWM fan connector for that fan for the heat
6:13
sink. We can also see the power delivery in there. So fairly basic. Uh there's no
6:17
active cooling on the power. Well, okay, there's act. Okay, there's no heat sinks
6:21
on the power circuitry, but what we do have is a fair amount of air flow is
6:27
going to be coming from the fan and going over the power connect or the
6:31
power circuitry because there's absolutely nothing restricting the air
6:35
flow out this way. So, what that means is that the GTX 550Ti is going to be a
6:41
fairly internal exhaust card cuz you can see here right along the entire top of
6:46
the shroud, there's a fairly substantial gap that's going to allow air to come
6:50
out this way, cool these memory chips, cool anything up here along the card.
6:54
Uh, same thing along the bottom. You're going to see there's a fairly substantial gap there. So, while we're
6:59
going to be exhausting some of the air out of the back plate, most of it is
7:03
going to be coming out the top, the bottom, and the back of the card. Like
7:06
maybe 20% of it is going to be externally exhausted. Now, this isn't
7:09
going to be a very hot running card, so I don't think that's going to be a huge
7:12
problem for you. Um, one last thing I should probably go over before we end
7:16
here is that it does support all of the usual NVIDIA technology. So, we've got
7:21
CUDA, 3D Vision, I already mentioned SLI, already mentioned NVIDIA Surround,
7:25
but all of that good stuff is supported. This is a gaming grade card. It's
7:29
targeted at people who are playing at 1680x 1050 or lower. So, don't expect to
7:34
be, you know, grabbing one of these if you're running on a huge 30-in monitor
7:38
or anything like that. But, it is a gaming grade sort of a uh entrylevel
7:44
performance grade card. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
7:47
GeForce GTX 550Ti or Tai if you prefer.
7:52
Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and
7:56
other computer videos. Irk, I forgot to
8:00
mention Physex, and I also wanted to mention the just the clock speeds of
8:03
this particular card. So, it's clocked at 900 MHz, which is substantially
8:07
higher than the old GTS 450, but the actual power consumption of the card has
8:11
only gone up slightly. So, I'm really looking forward to getting this guy on
8:15
the test bench. Once again, don't forget to subscribe.