14 DAY TRIAL // After many contradictory rumors, the specifications of Nvidia's upcoming GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card have been finally made official during the CeBIT 2011 fair, which takes place right now in Hannover, Germany, confirming that the card is actually based on a fully unlocked version of the GF106 core.
These details have come to light after the German HT4U website managed to get its hands on a series of Nvidia slides containing the specifications of the card.
These confirm the fact that the GTX 550 Ti uses a fully unclocked version of the GF106 core, dubbed GF116-400 by Nvidia, which packs 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus.
Just as we reported before, the GPU clock is set at 900MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 4,100MHz, providing 70% more bandwidth than the GTS 450, the card it is meant to replace.
According to Nvidia, the GTX 550 Ti delivers 20% better performance per watt than the GTS 450 as well as 28% faster performance.
When compared to AMD's Radeon HD 5770, Nvidia says the GTX 550 Ti is between 18% and 50% faster, depending on the game run.
The GTX 550 Ti is powered via a single 6-pin PCI Express connector as it uses only 116W of power, only 10W higher than the GTS 450.
In addition, the card supports 2-way SLI and features an impressive overclocking headroom, as Nvidia says the GPU can reach speeds in excess of 1GHz.
There will be two dual-link DVI-I ports and one mini HDMI port for display output.
The GTS 450 is based on the GF106 core with 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.
Just as the early leaks suggested, Nvidia will launch the GeForce GTX 550 Ti on March 15.