EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 2048 MB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 2DVI/Mini-HDMI SLI Ready Graphics Card, 02G-P3-1559-KR
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- GeForce GTX 550 Ti with 951 MHz core clock
- PCI-Express 2.0
- 2048 MB 192-bit 0.5ns GDDR5 memory
- 4356 MHz Effective memory clock and 1903 MHz shader clock
- NVIDIA 2-way SLI ready
Introducing the latest entry in the GeForce GTX 500 series product lineup: the EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti. Get your PC ready to dominate this year’s blockbuster game titles like Crysis 2 and Duke Nukem Forever. And with up to 6x the performance of previous generations graphics, you know you are well armed for the future. Performance is not the end of the story though; full DirectX 11 done right that blows away the competition, NVIDIA 3D Vision, NVIDIA Surround Gaming, NVIDIA PhysX and award winning EVGA support give you the edge on your opponents and peace of mind on your hardware. Get serious performance today with the EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti.Specifications include the GTX 550 Ti (951 MHz core clock) chipset, 2048MB of 0.5ns GDDR5 memory with a 4356 MHz memory clock, 192 bit memory interface, 1903 MHz shader clock, 104.5 GB/sec memory bandwidth, 30.4 GT/s texture fill rate, 192 CUDA cores and PCI Express 2.0 compatibility. Additional features include Microsoft DirectX 11 Support, NVIDIA
Graphics Card
EVGA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 2048 MB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 2DVI/Mini-HDMI SLI Ready Graphics Card, 02G-P3-1559-KR
List Price: $ 179.99
Price:
A Serious Gamers Video Card at not a so Astronomonical Price!,
This was my 2nd attempt at purchasing a Good Video Card for my son’s “Excalibur” Desktop that I had just finished building for him for his games, video & Picturing editing, and of course his academic pursuits. The 1st Video Card I brought for my son’s Excalibur Rig (A GIGABYTE Radeon HD 6450 1GB DDR3 DVI-I / D-Sub / HDMI Low Profile Graphics Card, GV-R645OC-1GI ) while did well with the 2nd and 3rd requirements the card fell short in the 1st requirement for his games, especially with video intensive games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed which would show seriously lagging durring the more intense action parts of the game. Plus the Windows 7 Index score was almost the same as my wifes ATI 4650HD Video Card in her Desktop which was 5.0 for Windows Aero and 6.3 (out of a possible 7.9) for Gaming Graphics.
So I did some heavy research and decided to look at the EVGA Cards (with the Nvidia chipsets)on what I heard about from thier reputation and see if I could find a serious Gaming Video Card without necessarily breaking the bank. So after looking at the different EVGA Cards between the $100 to $200 dollar range I finally decided to go with this model EVGA Card on the merits of the reviews (which were just over 4 and 1/2 stars at the time of purchase) and made the plung hoping I would not regret it (Like I did with the 1st Video Card)and it turns out I didn’t.
While the installation was fairly easy and without incident please be advised of the following…
1. This is no small card, you will need to 2 available pci/pci-e slots available in your tower (Just 1 pci-e 16x slot to plug it in).
2. You need at least a regular size ATX compatible tower (or preferably bigger) to fit this sucker in, No low profile option for this baby. The card measures at Height: 4.376in – 111.15mm by Length: 8.25in – 210mm.
3. The Minium power supply required by EVGA is a 400W power supply, I would not go any lower than 500W (My son’s PS is 750W Antec Green)
4. Comes with the EVGA Driver/Software Disc with EVGA Precision Tuning Utility (I just downloaded the current drivers from the Nvidia Website), Installtion Booklets, DVI to VGA adapter, and a 6 pin PCI-E Power Cable(My PS had a 6 pin connector available). Insure to plug this in or your Video Card will not work.
5. You will need to either purchase a HDMI to Mini HDMI Connector (Gold Plated HDMI to HDMI Mini cable, 2 M / 6.56 FT) or DVI Cable (Eforcity Black 6 FT / 2 Meter DVI-D M/M Digital /Digital Dual Link Cable for … seperatly (Go for the HDMI for best picture quality).
6. This card will only display up to 2 monitors unless you brought a second one of these cards (Of course you would need a second PCI-E Slot in your Mother board) or buy one that is specifically made for multiview (more than 2 displays).
All I can say once I installed the Nvidia Drivers was OMG, simple stuff like surfing the internet and moving through the desktop was pure joy. The Windows 7 experience Index was 7.3 for both Windows Aero and gaming grapics (Out of a possible 7.9) All the high resource end games me and my son threw at it not only played great but looked way better than ever before. Here are the following games we tried on it on full 1920 X 1080 with all other Video options set on the highest settings…
High End Resorce Games:
BattleField 3
Star Wars The Force Unleashed – Sith Edition
Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2
Spiderman 3 (Movie tie-in game)
Older End Games:
Battlefield 2
Again, all the games moved swiftly with no lag. No devation from the graphic frame. Both me and my son were stoked. Some of the reviewers complianed that the card made noise but it has been as quiet as a church mouse since installed.
While this card did not cost me say like some of even the higher end cards (These baby’s can go anywhere from starting at $250 to $900) it did cost me about 3 times as much as the 1st Video Card (which was about $55, you get what you pay for) at about 170 bones, in the end it was worth it.
Make sure that you register the card at EVGA’s website to take full advantage of the 3 year limited warranty.
Overall, An excellent card and look forward to playing some of these games myself. If you are looking for a high end gamers card or a Graphics design Card without necessarily breaking the bank then look no further.
System Specs: My Sons Desktop
Intel Core Dou 2 Quad 2.66ghz…
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Nice Video Card,
The video card was easy to install. Was up and running in just a matter of moments. I already had the current drivers for the card, so the swap was very easy.
The price was quite nice for 2gb of on board video ram. Only thing that I had a problem with was the precision software from EVGA. Really don’t see the point. The themes are cumbersome. Over all, great card. Nice upgrade from the gt430.
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Solid card, reasonable price,
Upgraded to this card about a week ago. Mostly, it’s a great card that can play most of your games at max settings without any issues at all. However, this card is not the top of the line available right now. For extremely graphically intense games, you might have to settle for moderate settings. The card will still handle those games just fine, but if you don’t want to sacrifice game performance you will probably have to keep the settings at a reasonable level. Overall, a great card for the price. Recommended for people on a budget that still wants a solid card. Cheaper cards just can’t handle the load this card can and to get noticeably better performance over this one, you’d have to drop at least another hundred or more.
That being said, I did have a handful of issues but they seem to have cleared up. These are the reasons the card did not get 5 stars. First of all, when playing the game League of Legends (which is not graphically intense at all) I had an issue where my screen froze and at one point even went black for a few seconds. This occurrence only happened once and has since seemingly have been fixed. Second, when playing Portal 2, I had an instance where when there was a lot of gel flowing on the screen, I would get minor flickering. There was only 1 part in the entire game this was apparent that had enough flowing gel to cause the issue. Third, and this was the worst scenario, my screen would randomly go black and my computer would freeze when simply browsing the internet, not even in a game or anything. This happened a total of 4 times, so it wasn’t a simple fluke.
Like I said, I believe this issues have been alleviated since they last happened. I uninstalled the drivers, ran a driver sweeper to clean out all previously installed drivers believing there may have been a conflict from something left behind from my old ATI card, did a clean install of the Nvidia drivers and so far so good. I also contacted EVGA’s customer support and, to my dismay, was told that there are sometimes conflicting errors in regards to a Motherboard’s onboard sound and the built in sound for the video card. Basically, I was told that I may have to go into Device Manager and manually disable the video card sound to keep it from conflicting. Doing this would prevent me from using the HDMI out on the video card, which is one of the selling points for me on the card. However, I currently have both the motherboard and the video card sound enabled and for the past couple of days, everything has been stable.
With so many issues, even 4 stars is a gift. However, in spite of the mishaps that occurred, this card deserves a good rating. It does the job well and has an extremely reasonable price even before the rebate. As long as no further issues crop up, then I believe this card is a bargain. Time will tell and if necessary, I’ll update or post another review.
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