Zotac GTX 550ti Review

Today we are going to review the Zotac Nvidia GTX 550ti

First lets have a look at some pictures

From this angle we can see that the card has a nice Black and Yellow Design and a 75mm fan for cooling
Kudos to Zotac for the colour scheme!

On the back of the card we have a 6pin Pci-E connector for an additional 75watts of power.
This card consumes about a 114 watts of power and we recommend a quality 450watt PSU to run it.

Now on the Rear I/O we have two DVI-I , one HDMI and a Displayport 1.2 output
This card can also support a VGA output by using a DVI to VGA adapter that is included with the card.

Finally we have a shot of the rear PCB and you can clearly see the PCI-E 2.0 x16 connector aswell as the SLI finger.

Two of these cards in SLI should near the performance of a GTX 570!

Now we have a few Benchmark Results that we would like to share

First up is Mafia 2

On Mafia 2 with everything maxed out at 1080p we get about 30 fps which is very playable. Now again this is a benchmark and real gameplay results will be higher so you can expect about 36-38 frames.

Next is Just Cause 2

On JC2 we turned down the settings a bit. AA was turned down to 4x instead of 8x and AF was at 10x instead of 16x. We managed around 35 frames on the benchmark at 1080p. Again during real gameplay you will get a better frame rate.

Finally we have a shot of GPU-Z

This is GPU-Z version 6.2 and it fixes the pixel rate calculation of fermi cards. So as you can see this card gets us 98.5 GB/s memory bandwidth and can be overclocked by a 100mhz on the core and memory without touching the voltage.

Competition:

This card stands between the Radeon 6770 and the 6790

It is a bit faster than the 6770 but lags behind the 6790

So if you can get this card at a price close enough to that of the 6770 we would say go for it!

However if its around the same price as a 6790 then the latter would prove to be a better choice

So finally we would say this is a great card at a good price and it comes with a 1 year extended warranty plan in addition to the normal warranty period.

So even if you have a 1080p monitor and are on a budget we would say get this card as by turning down the settings slightly you will experience a great visual experience!

Video:

Below is the video review of the same card done by one of our members

We here at NCS have decided to add this card to our list of Recommended graphics cards