NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Introduced Into The Mainstream

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NVIDIA has introduced a new mid-end mainstream graphics card into the marketplace. The recent GeForce GTX 560 was turning heads with its impressive SLI scaling and affordable price, but now it’s got a new buddy. Enter the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti, which is coming with a reference price of $150 and looks to be an affordable card for the masses.

How good is this card? And how does it compare to the AMD equivalent? According to testing done by PCPer.com, my site of choice for this sort of benchmarking, the GTX 550 Ti just barely edges out the AMD Radeon HD 5770 – the closest comparable card in AMD’s lineup. The $150 reference price also makes it cheaper than any of AMD’s offerings in their new Radeon HD 6000 series.

Here’s the technical stuff on the GTX 550 Ti:

• 192 CUDA cores
• 1800MHz clock speed, 900 MHz graphics clock
• 1GB VRAM on a 192-bit memory bus

Cards from all the major manufacturers have popped up, including ASUS, EVGA, ZOTAC, Galaxy, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit and PNY. So far, none have dropped below the $150 reference point although you may be able to find a rebate on some of the cards.

No word on how well the new card scales in SLI. The advantage of these mid-end cards is that you seem to get more graphics processing power to scale when you put them in SLI mode, as opposed to the higher-end cards.

You can pick up any of the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards where ever you like to buy graphics cards.