Review: Overclocking the GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Want to play the latest games without breaking your bank account? The latest GeForce GTX 550 Ti from NVIDIA could well be the solution. This US$ 149 card is fast enough to run most of today’s titles without noticeable slowdowns, and should be affordable enough for most value-conscious gamers looking for a budget card to play games with. For the complete review, you can read our previous GTX 550 Ti article.

While the GTX 550 Ti performs wonderfully at lower resolutions, some people may remain unsatisfied with its default performance. So, can we turn it into a faster card? Of course we can! By overclocking the GTX 550 Ti, we managed to obtain some additional speed increase. But how much faster could the card be?

NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti

Specification

	NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti	NVIDIA GTS 450
Streaming Multiprocessors	4	4
Stream Processors (CUDA Cores)	192	192
Texture Units	32	32
ROP Units	24	16
Graphics Clock	900 MHz	783 MHz
Shader Clock	1800 MHz	1566 MHz
Memory Clock (effective)	4104 MHz	3608 MHz
Memory Size	1024 MB	1024 MB
Memory Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Interface	192-bit	128-bit
Codename	GF116	GF106
Fabrication Process	40 nm	40 nm
Transistor Count	1.17 Billion	1.17 Billion
Die Size	228 mm²	228 mm²
Power Connectors	6-pin	6-pin
Min Recommended Power Supply	400 Watts	400 Watts
Thermal Design Power (TDP)	116 Watts	106 Watts
GPU Thermal Threshold	95 °C	100 °C
DirectX Version	11	11
Bus Support	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x16

The core of a GeForce GTX 550 Ti is clocked at a relatively high 900 MHz by default. It’s not surprising then, if some manufacturers decided to release pre-overclocked versions of GTX 550 Ti with clock speeds of more than 1000 MHz. Would a reference GTX 550 Ti be able to reach that kind of speed?

Overclocking

Our “test subjects” were a Galaxy GTX 550 Ti and Palit GTX 550 Ti Sonic. NVIDIA Inspector was the tool of choice. Here’s how we overclocked each card:

Galaxy GTX 550 Ti

The Galaxy 550 Ti was overclocked under two different conditions. First, the overclocking was carried out without changing the fan mode (leaving it at auto) and voltage settings. This way, we managed to increase the core and memory speed to 972 MHz and 4800 MHz, respectively.

For the second attempt, we maximized the fan speed and increased the core voltage to its maximum limit of 1.150 V. Such more aggressive move pushed the core and memory clock further to 1015 MHz and 4920 MHz.

Palit GTX 550 Ti Sonic

This card already comes pre-overclocked with a standard core frequency of 1000 MHz and a memory clock of 4400 MHz. We decided to immediately employ more advanced methods (by that we mean increasing the fan speed to maximum and bumping up the voltage to 1.150 V) to overclock this card and ended up with 1080 MHz for the core and 4920 MHz for the memory. Let’s move on to performance testing to see how much additional speed that we have gained through these overclocking attempts!