MSI GeForce GTX 550 Ti Cyclone II OC

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  16th March 2011 Author  DiGiTaL MoNkEY Editor  James "Agg" Rolfe Manufacturer  MSI Synthetic Benchmarks, Heat & Noise, Conclusions Synthetic Benchmarks: Benchmark: 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 11 Score: GPU/Graphics Score Only - Higher is Better. Download Link: here. Benchmark: Unigine Heaven Benchmark Score: Average Frames per Second (FPS) - Higher is Better. Download Link: here. Noise and Temperature Results: Noise measurements were taken with a digital sound meter approximately 3cm away from the video card fan, reducing the ability of other components such as the CPU or PSU fans to interfere with the final results. Software used for stressing was 3DMark Vantage, looped until the sound level was stable and stopped rising. Temperature readings were taken at an ambient temperature of approximately 22 degrees Celsius, on a open test bench with the fan set to auto. Load and idle temperatures were monitored by MSI's Afterburner utility. Software used for stressing was 3DMark Vantage, looped until the temperature was stable and stopped rising. Conclusions: Let's start off by talking about the GTX 550 Ti itself. With the introduction of another sub $200 card alongside the current GTS 450 and GTX 460/SE offerings that are yet to be EOL'd, our concern is users may find only $5-10 dollars between multiple models and brands when looking for a graphics cards in this performance segment. This may confuse some customers especially with pre-overclocked models boosting reference design performance, but we hope it is only a matter of time before we see any pricing adjustments for existing models to reduce customer confusion. That being said, NVIDIA have packed the GTX 550 Ti with a solid amount of performance suitable for any game utilising DirectX 9 to the latest DirectX 11. NVIDIA themselves describe this card as being suited for 1680x1050 gaming, we did find that even at 1920x1200 resolutions the majority of games with AA and AF enabled provided a suitable gaming experience with over 30fps, especially when overclocked. MSI's GeForce GTX 550 Ti offering moves away from NVIDIA's reference design by utilising their own PCB design, amped up clock speeds and Cyclone II cooling solution. Thanks to MSI's engineering and software, we were able to overclock the card to a racy 1060MHz core clock and 5000MHz on the memory, with room still left in it with for bit more tinkering. But what stood out most was MSI's Cyclone II cooling solution that is designed with a nice balance of keeping the card extremely well cooled during idle and load, while maintaining some of the lowest noise levels we have seen in non-reference cooling solution - very impressive. Feel free to comment on this review in this thread. << Back OCAU Main Page Select Page Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 -

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