Review (Galaxy) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti: The Cheapest GTX 500 a Gamer Can Get
GALAXY GTX 550 Ti
Our review this time is based on a Galaxy GTX 550 Ti graphics card. It’s standard card that follows NVIDIA’s reference specification, and therefore should be able to give you a clue as to how well a standard GTX 550 Ti would perform.
Sales Package and Contents
The design of the package is of typical Galaxy fashion, with a picture of the outer space dominating the front section and “8 good reasons why you should have a graphics card” written on the back.
These are the items that you will find inside the box:
- Quick Installation Guide
- Driver Disc
- Molex to 6-pin Power Converter
There should be a manual book/ booklet somewhere inside, but apparently our sample unit is lacking one.
The Graphics card
This is the graphics card itself, Galaxy’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti with blue PCB and prominent heat sink fan. The HSF is non-reference and occupies two slots when installed inside a casing. The PCB is of non-reference design as well.
In our opinion, Galaxy GTX 550 Ti’s HSF looks a bit like an alien spaceship from Hollywood movies. The actual heatsink beneath the cooler’s body consists of a copper base with rounded aluminum fins around it. An 8-cm fan sits on top. The heatsink assembly only cools down the GPU since there is no direct contact with the memory chips, but the fan should be able to blow enough wind to dissipate the heat from these.
We did a temperature management, and these are the results:
GALAXY GTX 550 Ti
- Full-load : 65 °C (fan speed 55 %)
- Idle : 34 °C (fan speed 40 %)
The good news is, Galaxy puts a passive heatsink on top of the VRM section. It’s also visible that Galaxy uses high-quality components such as solid capacitors and ferrite chokes on this product.
A single, 6-pin PCI Expres connector is used to supply power. The graphics card requires at least a 400 watt PSU.
The main interface is, of course, PCI Express 2.0 x16. It’s also compatible with older revisions such as the PCI Express 1.0 x16.
You can use the SLI connector on top of this graphics card to connect it to an identical pair and run them both in SLI configuration.
This picture shows the card’s PCB layout as seen from the back.
Galaxy GTX 550 Ti offers a different set of display output connectors compared to NVIDIA’s standard card. It consists of one DVI port, one D-SUB connector, and one HDMI port. This eliminates the need to bundle separate display converters with the graphics card.
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