Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti Review: Bridging The Budget Gap

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First the gt 430, now another nvidia card i will not consider buying. I wouldnt mind if ATI released a 6770 or something to replace the 5770. A little bit more performance with all the 6xxx series features and crossfire scaling at the same price as the 5770 is currently would be great. The problem is the older 5770 price hasnt dropped enough to make it a great buy anymore. But it has done well for such an old card, impressive.
 
[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]"ATI" already has...http://guru3d.com/news/amd-to-rename-5700-to-6700-/[/citation]
wow, not really what i wanted, its just re-branding. If they can get the xfire scaling and features of the new cards along with some clock speed increase, that would be good.
 
I'm happy they brought this card out, this card will drive a lot of the mid-to-low end cards down. You can never have enough competition.

Gotta say though on paper i would have thought the GTX 550 would have been slightly superior. But the only discrepancies seem to be the biased games, they should make that sh*t illegal
 
so why not just buy a 460 768mb for 150$? that's what i did... the 5770 is too slow and at 150 why not just fork over the extra $ for the better card?
 
Why bother? I just bought a EVGA 460 1GB for $150 (the same price as the 550).
Ok, so it's not common to find a 460 at $150 but it's easy to find them at $170. So again why bother?
 
when did nvidia bought tomshardwhare?
Was that part of the deal with Bestofmedia?
 
[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]Not quite correct: AMD said the 6800 series was made to replace the 5850 space. They made it clear the 5700 series will fight the $100-$200 battle for the forseeable future as they do what's needed in this price range.There is no 6x00 series card on the near horizon to replace them. It may well be that they will stay in the channel until a 7000-series replacement is available.[/citation]

Thanks for the reply Cleeve. I agree with you that the 5700 series does exactly what is needed (and thats all) in the $100-150 space at the moment and as far as AMD's strategy it makes sense. However I feel that reason for the pricing of the 5700 series and 6800 series has nothing to do with production cost or expenditure for AMD, but is simply the price they can get away with due to lack of competition. It appears to me that if NVidia had made the 550 TI somewhere between the two 460 models in perfomance terms, then AMD would have been forced to drop the price on the 6850 and 6870 and properly transition to the 6000 series. However I have a feeling (I don't know for sure though) that NVidia are cautious about getting into a price war with AMD like we had with the 4850 vs GTX250 (or 9800 GTX+) and 4870 vs GTX260. It is this that I find as a consumer as particularly vexing because it is almost like some form of non-collusive price-fixing and is bad for price-perfomance (i.e. my 4850 CF example).

I'm curious to hear what you think though: Do you think NVidia is avoiding a price war atm with AMD and do you think there is a significant perfomance gap between the 550 TI and 560 TI?

 
when did nvidia bought tomshardwhare?
Was that part of the deal with Bestofmedia?
Click to expand...

What part of "the point is if the GeForce GTX 550 Ti sticker settles close to the Radeon HD 5770, it’s a good buy" seems fanatical and biased to you?

I suppose your unbiased, balanced and fair conclusion would have been "If it is a GeForce never buy it, ever, no matter the price/performance ratio"?

I'm pretty sure folks can tell which of us has a bias, bilkidllc... 😀

 


I really have no idea what Nvidia's strategy is, which is why this card's fate is so cloudy. They haven't exactly been consistent: look at the GTX 470, a card that was overpriced for most of it's life, but then surprisingly slashed to compete with the 6870.

I suspect they were hoping the 550 Ti's 192-bit interface would have taken them further past the 5770. The benches suggest it's not really helping all that much, and after writing up this review I've since seen evidence that Nvidia is still working the bugs out of the mixed memory density.

Either Nvidia will be able to leverage more performance out of that memory interface through driver tweaks, or not. If they can make it work better, I can see the 550 Ti price staying where it is.

If they can't make it work faster, they're going to be hard pressed selling them at $150 except to GeForce die-hards.
That alone doesn't guarantee they'll drop the price right away, mind you--the GTX 470 remained too expensive vs. the 5850 for a long time. Having said that, the 550 Ti should be cheap enough to produce to fight on the 5770's price turf.

Really, it's hard to call without a crystal ball. It makes more sense to simply say: if the 550 Ti can be bought close to Radeon 5770 price point it's a good buy, but if it stays as expensive as 460 768MB it's not.
 
According to the article the 5770 was not overclocked so you compared a 550ti with a stock 5770 and you say it is a little faster, Excep those 2 games that favor ati/amd and nvidia the logical conclusion is a 5770 beats a 550ti at stock and when bought cards are overclocked. So this is not a good thing for nvidia.
 


***NO***


This is incorrect.


Read the test setup and benchmarks section.
An overclocked card was underclocked to reference specifications to get the 550 Ti results.


The difference the factory overclock makes is highlighted on the overclocked page results.
 
Probably it is, i was visiting from my phone, and did not read everything, i had to close it. My mistake. The 550ti sits just above the 5770.
Thank you for pointing that..probably again. :)
 
MEH - A random word when people either don't know what to say, don't care, can't answer a question or are too drunk to form a coherent English phrase.

I take it that - wiinippongamer doesn't care..
LOL.
 
[citation][nom]hardcore_gamer[/nom]The far superior, less power consuming 6850 is available for only $10 more..This card is pointless[/citation]

Just received my second 6850 for CF and I am very impressed with their performance. Also, I've got them running comfortably on a 650w psu... for ~$320 and not having to buy another PSU, I'm definitely pleased.

AMD Phenom II 1055t @4Ghz (1.45v)
Noctua D-14 HSF 1x140mm 1x120mm
Asus 890FX 6Gb Sata USB 3.0
4 Gb A.Data 2000Mhz (1525mhz 7-7-7-21)
60Gb OCZ Vertex SSD
640GB WD Caviar Black
1.5TB WD Caviar Black
2TB WD Caviar Green
2 x XFX Dual Fan 6850 1Gb DDR5 CF
NXZT Lexa S 3x120mm 2x140mm
Corsair TX650w PSU
2 Monitors on Desk (23's HP)
1 46'LCD 120Hz Samsung in living room 5.1 Yamaha/Klipsch
 
hardcore_gamer :

The far superior, less power consuming 6850 is available for only $10 more..This card is pointless




you two guys must be on the payroll... :kaola:
 
I'm must be confused.

You've got the 450 that gets an absolute beat down by the 6850 at the same price or the 5770 at a substantial savings with similar performance.

I just don't see it.. maybe I'm blind.
 
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