14 DAY TRIAL // Although the Nvidia built GTX 550 Ti was just launched, Gigabyte couldn't miss this opportunity to release its own version of the card, the factory overclocked GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC.
Just as most of its competitors, the Taiwanese company chose to pair the GF116-400 core with a custom-designed printed circuit board and cooling system, that promise to offer improved overclocking headroom and better operating temperatures.
This is comprised of a copper-base aluminum heatsink that sits right on the GPU and of a 100mm fan designed to dissipate the heat generated by the card while in operation.
In addition, Gigabyte has also decided to cool the VRMs of the GTX 550 Ti OC and placed a low profile aluminum heatspreader on the 3+1 power phases used for powering the GPU and memory.
Although the whole cooling assembly looks pretty frugal at first sight, it is more than sufficient for this graphics card, since the GTX 550 Ti has a TDP of only 116W, 10W more than the GTS 450 it's meant to replace.
In fact, the cooling system even allowed Gigabyte to overclock the GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC as its core runs at 970MHz, 70MHz more than Nvidia's stock frequency, while the memory is boosted to run at an effective 4,200MHz (up from 4,104MHz).
The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti OC is available right now for purchase and is priced at $149.99.
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.