14 DAY TRIAL // Together with all the other Nvidia board partners, Palit has also announced its line of GTX 550 Ti graphics cards, and the company's most powerful model, the GTX 550 Ti Sonic, comes factory overclocked to work at no less than 1GHz.
To allow for the high factory overclock, Palit has designed a custom cooling solution for the Sonic that features an over-sized fan as well as an aluminum heatsink with a copper base that sits directly on top of the GF116-400 core.
The large diameter fan is covered by a plastic shroud that should ensure that the card's printed circuit board gets a decent amount of airflow, a must considering that Palit has chosen not to cool the VRM or the memory chips in any way.
Speaking of the memory, this is also overclocked to work at 1100MHz (4400MHZ effective), 100MHz higher than Nvidia's stock clock.
The second card to make its appearance in the company's lineup is called the Palit GTX 550 Ti and has its graphics core clocked at the standard 900MHz while the memory works at 1050MHz.
Both of Palit's GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics cards are based on Nvidia's GF116-400 core that packs 192 CUDA processors, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and features a 192-bit memory bus that is connected to 1GB of video buffer.
This core is meant to replace the older GF106 GPU that is used inside the desktop Nvidia GTS 450 video card.
According to AnandTech, 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 (although some online retailers sell it even cheaper).
The Sonic version of Palit's GTX 550 Ti is not available for purchase, but its lower clocked sibling is listed at $152.99 on Newegg.