Inno3d GTX 550Ti 1GB Video Card Review

A lot of today's games are quite demanding when it comes to computer system requirements. Computer game graphics have become so complicated that video cards released just a few years ago won't be able to run them at all. The processing power for computer games comes mainly from the video card. The faster your video card is, the more likely your games will run faster and better. There are several video cards that you can choose from.

There are low-end cards which you can buy cheap but you probably won't receive the performance you'll need for better gaming performance. You have mid-range video cards which can play almost any game out there. Sometimes you have to turn down the settings in order to play faster. They are fairly-priced but the problem is choosing the right one. And of course, we have the high-end video cards that cost a ton of money but you'll most likely be able to play any game at maximum graphics quality setting.

The mid-range segment is probably the most competitive since the performance-price ratio in this range is apt for avid gamers and more of them are able to afford these cards. The GeForce GTX 550ti is among the competitors in this range and one of the cheapest brands is Inno3D. I bought one a couple of weeks ago and here are my thoughts about it.

The reference Nvidia Geforce GTX550ti has a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a memory clock speed of 1800 mhz. Inno3D bumped these settings up a bit thus, the Inno3D GTX 550ti comes with a 920 MHz core clock speed and 1840 MHz memory clock. In the real world, the increase in clock speeds isn't easily noticeable. I brought down the clock speed to the reference speed and there are only 1-3 frames per second difference and sometimes none.

When it comes to the size of the card, it's actually not that big. It's even smaller than older cards such as the 8800 GTS. It will fit most mid-ATX tower cases. However, it will take 2 slots on your board because of the fan and heat sink. It also depends on the design of your motherboard. As for its connectors, there's a mini HD connector and 2 DVI ports.

It only needs one 6-pin power connector and a 400 to 500-watt power supply would suffice. The Inno3D GTX 550Ti package includes the driver CD and a DVI to VGA converter. There's nothing special about the package though. It's just a simple box.

The most important part of a video card is its performance. The Nvidia GTX550Ti graphics processor should compete at least against the ATI Radeon 5770. It's fairly stronger than the Radeon card especially when you increase the graphics settings of your game. But it can certainly run today's games.

The Inno3D brand is quite famous in the market. We can attribute that to the pricing of the card. It is quite cheap compared to other brands. As a matter of fact, the Inno3d card is around $10-20 cheaper than other brands such as the EVGA GTX550ti. It is also most likely due to the lower factory clock speed of the card.

Overall, the Inno3D GTX 550ti 1GB video card does what it is supposed to do. It can play today's games. With the power of NVIDIA's GTX 550ti, you can even bump up your settings to higher quality including anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Add that to the cheap price of the card and you can definitely get your money's worth. However, due the market being very flexible, there may be other cards than can compete with its price that can outperform the GTX550ti.

Source:

Inno3D

http://www.inno3d.com/products/graphic_card/gf500/gtx_550ti.html

Geforce.com

http://www.geforce.com/#/Hardware/GPUs/geforce-gtx-550ti/specifications