14 DAY TRIAL // Although the Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card is expected to be officially launched in a little more than a week from now, some websites have already started listing such solutions online and one of the first cards to make its appearance is the MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II 1GD5 OC.
The card popped up on the Chinese Taobao auction website, and the seller says he has more than 20 cards in his possession which are retailed for 2000 Chinese yuan, approximately $304 US.
While the price is presumably more than twice as high as Nvidia's MSRP for the GTX 550 Ti, the pictures look indeed legit, making it one of the first GF116-based graphics cards to be spotted in the wild.
Sadly, no details regarding its specifications are provided, except for the fact that the card uses 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer connected via a 192-bit wide memory bus, which confirms what we had previously known about the GF116 core.
As many other MSI graphics cards before it, the N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II 1GD5 OC uses the Cyclone II cooling system which claims it can provide 23 degree Celsius lower full-load temperatures compared to the stock GTX 550 Ti.
The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is going to be officially launched on March 15 and the card is based on the GF116-400 core which packs 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus.
The GPU's reference clock is set at 900MHz, while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 4,100MHz, providing 70% more bandwidth than the GTS 450, the graphics card it is meant to replace.
Performance wise, the GTX 550 Ti is expected to sit right between the GTS 450 and the GTX 460 768MB, and Nvidia says it delivers 20% better performance per watt than the GTS 450 as well as 28% faster performance.