14 DAY TRIAL // After a month full of leaks, Nvidia has finally made the GeForce GTX 550 Ti official, and EVGA is one of the first companies to announce graphics solutions based on the GF116-400 core. Its cards are known as the GeForce GTX 550 Ti Superclocked and the GTX 550 Ti FPB and both come factory overclocked.
At first sight the cards don't seem to differ from Nvidia's reference design as both are covered with a black shroud that features an 80mm fan used to cool an aluminum heatsink.
This is more than enough to keep in check the temperatures of the core as its TDP is rated at only 116W, 10W higher than the GTS 450.
Furthermore, the GTX 550 is also pin compatible with the GTS 450, so Nvidia's board partners can reuse the printed circuit boards (PCB) and custom cooling solutions they designed for Nvidia's previous mainstream cards in order to save costs and reduce the time to market.
Moving back to EVGA's solutions, the GTX 550 Ti Superclocked is the fastest of the two cards, as its GPU is clocked at 981MHz while the memory runs at 4514MHz.
In comparison, the GTX 550 Ti FPB comes clocked at 951MHz and the memory works at 4356MHz.
However, both are faster than the 900MHz/1002MHz clocks set by Nvidia for the stock version of the GTX 550 Ti, and feature 192 CUDA processors, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units, and a 192-bit memory bus that is connected to 1GB of video buffer.
Just as all other EVGA GTX 500-series graphics cards, the newly launched models are bundled together with the 3DMark 11 benchmarking program and with some special EVGA tools.
Pricing for the GTX 550 Ti FPB has been established at $149.99, while the Superclocked version is available for $159.99.
According to AnandTech, the GTX 550 Ti is about 7% faster than the Radeon HD 5770, but it costs 36% more than AMD's solution, and 15% slower than the GTX 460 768MB which retails for $129 (although some online retailers sell it even cheaper).