14 DAY TRIAL // One thing about new video cards is that they come out in waves whenever NVIDIA or AMD decides to unleash a new base model, so it is no surprise to hear that Lantic also stepped up to unveil a GTX 550 Ti adapter.
As consumers have no doubt already learned, NVIDIA released its GeForce GTX 550 Ti mainstream Fermi board with DirectX 11 support.
Meanwhile, Colorful, Galaxy, Zotac and Micro-Star International, among others, all unleashed one or more custom versions.
Now, Lantic technology is joining the crowd with a GTX 550 that can be said to be among the most powerful so far presented.
Many of the newcomer controllers carried some amount of factory overclocking and, in the case of Colorful, even two BIOSes that could switch between stock and overclocked settings.
Lantic decided to utilize the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro cooler, whose four copper heatpipes and 35 aluminum fins, not to mention 92mm fans (two) with rotary speed of 1,000 to 2,000 RPM, should handle quite a bit of extra heat.
That said, the outfit pushed the GF116 GPU (graphics processing unit), the 192 CUDA cores (shaders) and the 1 GB of GDDR5 memory to 1,040 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 4,400 MHz, respectively.
For the sake of comparison, the stock settings are 900 MHz, 1,800 MHz and 4,100 MHz, respectively, meaning that only the shaders ended up without tweaks.
As for connectivity, Lantic's GeForce GTX 550 Ti boasts a mini HDMI output, plus dual-DVI ports.
Needless to say, DirectX 11 graphics are supported, as are 2-way SLI (multi-GPU) configurations.
The company did not include any sort of pricing details in its press release but, considering that NVIDIA's original offer, as well as those of most of its other partners, stuck near the $149 mark, Lantic will probably not let the factory overclocking push the cost much higher either.