14 DAY TRIAL // Several European online retailers have listed Nvidia's yet unreleased GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card, revealing its specifications as well as the card's price. Contrary to the leaks that made it to the Web until now, the GTX 550 Ti will be an overclocked version of the company's previous mainstream solution, the GTS 450.
The GeForce GTX 550 Ti made its first appearance almost two weeks ago when it was spotted in one of the configuration files of an Nvidia beta graphics driver.
Few details about the card were available back then, but, shortly after, all sort of leaks started making their appearance, stating that the card is actually based on a fully fledged version of the GF106 core.
However, the PNY card that was just listed by some European retailers comes to dispute these claims and reveals that the GTX 550 Ti is actually just an overclocked version of the GTS 450.
This means the GTX 550 packs the same 192 streaming processors, 32 texturing units, 16 ROPs and 128-bit memory bus, as its predecessor, while the GPU and the memory are now running at 900MHz and 4.1GHz, respectively.
As a result, the memory bandwidth has increased from 57.5GB/s, in the original GTS 450, to 65.5GB/s.
In light of these recent findings, the GTX 550 Ti is expected to be about as fast as an HD 5770 and slower than the 768MB version of the GTX 460.
But the card's biggest problem is its price, as it has been listed at a whopping €157 (incl VAT), a lot more than the €100 the GTS 450 retails for.
Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt as many retailers list unreleased hardware at much higher prices than the company's recommended values.
As previous reports suggest, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti is expected to become official on March 15. (via VR-Zone)