14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of last week, the first information about Nvidia's upcoming GTX 550 Ti graphics card made they way on the Web, and today we get to share with you additional details about the GF116-400 core on which the new card is based.
According to the it168 website, which learned of these specifications through special channels, the card is based on a fully enabled version of the GF106 core that was modified in order to include the new architecture enhancements brought by Nvidia with the 500-series GPUs.
The previous GTS 450 graphics card, which the GTX 550 Ti is designed to replace, is based on the same GF106 core that stands at the heart of Nvidia's new board, but it actually features a cut-down version of the GPU.
This has one of the three sets of memory controllers/ROP units disabled limiting it to a 128bit memory bus with 256KB of L2 cache and 16 ROPs.
This, however, won't be the case with the GF116-400 as the card packs the full 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus.
This is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 memory which is clocked at 4100MHz while the card's GPU runs at 900MHz.
The wide memory bus, as well as the improved clocks, allowed Nvidia to raise the video buffer bandwidth to 98.4GB/s compared to the 57.7GB/s of the GTS 450.
According to some previous reports, the GTX 550 Ti will carry a 110W TDP which will enable Nvidia to use the same reference PCB and cooling system as that used in the GTS 450.
In light of these new findings, the performance of the card is expected to come under that of the 768MB version of the GTX 460 while its price is estimated at 999 yuan (about $151 US). The GTX 550 Ti is rumored to be released on March 15.
