The Passive Gigabyte & Overclocked HIS HD 6770 meet the EVGA GTX 550 Ti

by apoppin · August 16, 2011

The EVGA GTX 550 Ti

Last September, 2010, Nvidia introduced their first Sniper, the GeForce GTS 450 and later in April of this year, Nvidia introduced a new GeForce Sniper for gamers that’s even more powerful, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti! Yes, Ti stands for Titanium and it brings back fond memories of the old GeForce Ti series which offered excellent bang for buck back then. Here is EVGA’s new moderately-overclocked GTX 550 Ti.

The GTX 560 Ti took direct aim at especially the HD 5770 as well as the then upcoming HD 6770 which was rebranded and internally improved with new features but with similar gaming performance. The reference version of the GTX 550 Ti’s core is clocked at 901MHz while our version of the EVGA GTX 550 Ti is overclocked to 951MHz. We reviewed the EVGA GTX 550 Ti here last April.

GTX 550 Ti Specifications

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti was redesigned from the GTS 450 to deliver exceptional tessellation performance, which is a key component of Microsoft’s DirectX 11 development platform for PC games. Tessellation allows game developers to take advantage of the GeForce GTX 550 GPU’s tessellation ability to increase the geometric complexity of models and characters to deliver far more realistic and visually rich gaming environments.

Here are the stock and EVGA GTX 550 Ti’s compared:

The new Fermi GF116 GTX 550 Ti brings a lot of features to the table that current Nvidia customers will appreciate, including improved CUDA’s PhysX, Surround to drive up to 3 LCDs with GTX SLI, 3D Vision, superb tessellation capabilities and a really fast GPU. We also see the GTX 550 TI launch with 1GB of vRAM instead of the expected 768MB due to being engineered to use mixed density GDDR5 memory for the first time. This is actually a big deal although 1GB of vRAM is not likely to be really useful over 768MB in this class of card until they are paired in SLI. The GTS 450 was completely re-engineered at the transistor level into the GF116 GTX 550 Ti. Through a complete Fermi redesign on a mature process on TSMC’s 40 nm, the GTX 550 GPU achieves higher clockspeed than the GTS 450 with significantly more performance per watt and with fewer transistors. Only one 6-pin PCIe connector which may be supplied by molex adapters is required.

The EVGA GTX 550 Ti

The EVGA GTX 550 Ti comes in a no-frills box which means there is little packing to recycle or toss. Besides your new GTX 550 Ti, you get the driver CD, the user and quick-start guides, a VGA to DVI adapter and a PCIe to molex adapter (not shown) plus a EVGA sticker.

Of course EVGA also sells their video cards at retail and there is plenty of information right on the box.

The Competing Cards go head-to-head

This review is going to be a 3-horse race. We have already established the performance of the stock and overclocked GTX 550 Ti as well as the stock and overclocked HD 5770s which have identical performance to the HD 6770. We have already evaluated the EVGA GTX 550 Ti and in the picture below, next to it is the card it was taking direct aim at – the HD 5770. We were able to fit their performance in with the GTX 460, then the HD 6870, the GTS 450, the HD 6950 and the GTX 570 in our review here. And now we want to see if anything has changed over the past six months; especially with the new HD 6770s versus the EVGA GTX 550 Ti.