£115 inc VAT • nvidia.co.uk • tinyurl.com/3tmyqos
Both this GeForce GTX 550 Ti and the GTX 560 Ti reviewed on page 6 6 are nVidia's reference designs. They run at the standard factory speeds, and have none of the additional bells or whistles that some vendors add. You can expect identical performance from branded cards with standard specifications. The GTX 550 Ti sits at the lower end of nVidia's line-up, costing around £115 online. It's more powerful than the less expensive ATI Radeon HD 6670 (page 64), and requires a single six-pin power connector from the PSU. However, it's just as short as that card, and will easily fit into a standard system case. The nVidia has rather low specifications, with a 192bit memory bus that provides 98.5Gbps of memory bandwidth - around half that of the top-end GTX 580 (page 67). And it has just 192 stream processors; the GTX 580 has 512. Our games tests revealed a wide gap between this GTX 560 Ti and ATI's low-end HD 6670. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Stalker: Call of Pripyat and Crysis, the nVidia card delivered consistently better framerates. Even so, it was unable to manage a playable framerate of 30fps in Crysis at 1280x1024 pixels. The GTX 550 Ti costs around £50 more than the HD 6670 and, importantly, breaks the £100 psychological barrier. It's worth splashing out though, because the GTX 560 Ti delivers playable framerates at a full-HD (1920x1080-pixel) screen resolution. For just £20 more, however, MSI's R6870 Hawk (left) offers far better value with a 60 percent performance hike in Battlefield and Stalker, and around 40 percent in Crysis. nVidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti isn't powerful enough to cope with games any more intensive than today's 3D titles, and keen gamers will quickly become frustrated with this card. If at all possible, stretch your budget by £20 and save yourself a second graphics card upgrade a year down the line. VERDICT: nVidia's GeForce GTX 560 Ti offers significantly better performance than its ATI rival, but it costs £50 more. The more powerful HD 6870 offers considerably better value at £135.
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