Gainward GeForce GTX 550 Ti GS

Now we’ve reached the direct rival to the AMD Radeon HD 6790. The GeForce GTX 550 Ti series is represented by a Gainward product.

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti Golden Sample is Gainward’s new card with 1 gigabyte of onboard memory. The memory frequency is pre-overclocked by 300 MHz (+7.3%) to 4400 MHz whereas the GPU is clocked at 1000 MHz instead of the reference card’s 900 MHz (+11.1%). I could not overclock the GPU further but the memory chips were stable at 5100 MHz:

The simple cooler of this card, hailing from the very beginning of the 21st century, consists of a single aluminum heatsink and a slim 92mm fan. It copes with its job well enough, though. The GPU was only 78°C hot at a fan speed of 2370 RPM:

AMD Radeon HD 5770

It is also going to be interesting to compare the new Radeon HD 6790 with the old Radeon HD 5770. I’ve got a reference sample of the latter card but installed a Deep Cool V4000 cooler on it:

I overclocked the sample from its default 850/4800 MHz to 965/1300 MHz:

AMD Radeon HD 6870

The last graphics card in this review is a reference AMD Radeon HD 6870 which will serve as a reference point of the rest of the cards because it comes from the next performance and price category ($229).

Now that we’ve looked through the products to be tested, let's move on to the tests proper.