14 DAY TRIAL // As we are getting nearer to March 15, the official release date of the GTX 550 Ti, more details about Nvidia's upcoming video card come to surface, so nobody will be surprised to find out that some early benchmarks have already made their way onto the Web.
All the benchmarks were run using a Gigbayte GV-N550OC-1GI graphics card that comes factory overclocked to feature a 970MHz core and 1050MHz memory.
To put things into perspective, the stock GTX 550 Ti has its core clocked at 900MHz while the memory is run at 1025MHz.
As we see from the screenshots posted on the ChipHell forum, Gigabyte's card was tested using an Intel Core i7 920 processor, that is clocked at 2.67GHz.
The user who provided these results used four benchmarks for the test, 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark 11, StarCraft II and Call of Duty: Black Ops, and, according to ComputerBase, the 3DMark scores put the card right between the Radeon HD 5770 and GeForce GTX 460 (768 MB).
As far as its StarCraft II and COD performance is concerned, the GTX 550 Ti allowed for a 1920x1080 resolution to be selected in both titles, although the minimum frame rates recorded in SC2 are pretty low for a smooth gameplay.
The GeForce GTX 550 Ti 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 that is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 video buffer.
Thanks to the improved memory speeds as well as to the wider bus, the GTX 550 Ti provides 70% more bandwidth than the GTS 450, the graphics card it is meant to replace.
In addition, the GTX 550 Ti has a TDP of only 116W (10W more than the GTS 450), features two-way SLI support, two dual-link DVI-I ports and one mini HDMI port.
