The only thing I can think of that would make a Graphics card perform faster is a faster cpu if you previously had a bad one and it was getting bottlenecked by your duel core 2.3 ghz cpu. You can also overclock the GPU which will make it perform a bit faster buy other than that I don`t know. You can`t make an old GPU like GTX 550 perform faster if you aldready have components that suits it. What you pay for is what you get. But what you can do is to make the GPU perform better and survive over a long period of time by buying after market coolers or watercooling perhaps. Having a good Power supply is important aswell because it powers your computer, so you can`t cheap out on that, you need it to give enough power to the gpu, cpu, ram e.t.c.