Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti Review: Bridging The Budget Gap

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Nvidia has a sizable gap in its product line between the GeForce GTS 450 and the GeForce GTX 460 768 MB. The company is filling that gap with an all-new card called the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Is this product a worthy competitor for AMD's Radeon HD 5770?

Overclocking And SLI Benchmarks

Let’s see how effective the factory overclocks are on the Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition and MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II.

We’re also interested in seeing how much of a performance increase we can expect from two GeForce GTX 550 Tis in SLI:

The factory-overclocked GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards close about half of the performance gap between the reference card and the GeForce GTX 460 768 MB. This might take a little bit of the sting out of the news that the 768 MB card is being discontinued.

We can also see that a second GeForce GTX 550 Ti card is a viable SLI upgrade option, with a high potential performance increase. This will vary from game to game, but SLI and CrossFire have made great strides in consistency over the past few years.

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.