14 DAY TRIAL // Asus is well known for its heavily customized graphics cards, and the company's latest solutions based on Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti are no exception to this rule as the trio features a redesigned PCB and cooling assembly that allowed the company to clock its fastest graphics card at no less than 1015MHz.
Until now, this is the highest factory overclock reached by any GTX 550 Ti card, and, in order to make it happen, Asus used the company's DirectCu design.
This packs all-copper direct contact heatpipes to draw the heat away from the GPU and into an aluminum heatsink that is cooled via a large diameter fan.
In the company's view, this provides up to a 20 percent advantage over Nvidia's reference cooling solution when running at full speed.
Together with the GPU, Asus has also overclocked the memory of the ENGTX550 Ti Ultimate as this now runs at 1050MHz, compared to the stocks 1000MHz.
Right below the Ultimate version is the ENGTX550 Ti Top that also packs an overclocked core and memory, but, this time, these are run at 975MHz and 1026MHz, respectively.
The last Asus GTX 550 Ti graphics card announced today is the ENGTX550 Ti DC/DI/1GD5, which has its core clocked only 10MHz higher than Nvidia's 900MHz stock frequency while the memory runs at 1026MHz.
Pricing for the card has been established at $149, while the Top version is listed at $10 more. The Ultimate version isn't available for purchase yet.
At the heart of the GTX 550 Ti lies the GF116-400 core that is comprised of 192 CUDA processors, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units, and a 192-bit memory bus that is connected to 1GB of video buffer.
Performance wise, as AnandTech has found out, the stock version of 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.