GeForce GTX 550 Ti review MSI Cyclone II OC

So the all new GTX 550 Ti -- yeah there it is again, Ti. NVIDIA started Ti (Titanium) branding in the GeForce 3 era many many moons ago; which stretched all the way to products like GeForce 4 Ti 4200 back in the year 2002. After 2003 the Ti series came to a grinding halt as the naming schema had to be changed to GeForce FX.

Back to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti itself, aimed against the Radeon HD 5770 series the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is based on a new GPU refresh, the GF116-400 silicon which features 192 shader processors, a somewhat weird 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface, and a core clock speed of 900 MHz for the reference models.

This GF106-400 GPU is the successor to the GTS 450, which had the GF106 graphics processor. So the GeForce GTX 560 Ti has 192 Shader processor cores, and a 192-bit wide memory interface with 1 GB of memory tied to it for the product released today.

For those that say, 'hey -- 1024MB over 64-bit memory controller ... is not possible', well it is. NVIDIA mixed density memory chips. One block of 512MB 64Mx32 is used and then two 256MB 32Mx32 partitions are tied to the memory controllers. The new GPU has holstered a rather high GPU clock speeds, with 900 MHz core, 1800 MHz on the shader cores, and 4100 MHz (GDDR5 effective data rate) memory, chunking out a decent 98 GB/s in memory bandwidth.

Focus at the shader processors, then you can see we have precisely half available of the 384 Shader processors based GeForce GTX 560 Ti. So that certainly is a huge step down from big Brother GTX 560. The GPU has 1.17 Billion transistors and for the geeks, is has 24 ROPs and 32 Texture units. 

Okay so the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is still based on a 40nm fabrication node. All cards deriving and based on this GPU will be based on a dual or maybe even a triple-slot custom cooling design based on what the AIB/AIC partners prefer and come with two dual-link DVI and a mini-HDMI connector. HDMI will again pass sound through, including bit streaming support for Dolby True HD and DTS-HD Master. Being a mid-range product, only 2-way SLI will be allowed and thus you'll only see a single SLI finger/connector on the PCBs. Okay, the next stop will be an extensive photo-shoot of today's products.