ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU TOP Graphics Card Review

The Appearance

Card Details

Here’s a summarized detail of the card.

More details at the official product page

Test Setup

The computer setup used for this review.

The Performance

World In Conflict

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Looks like it’s in between the GTS 450 and GTX 460.

Crysis

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Just slightly faster than the GTS 450.

Mafia II

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Looks pretty close.

Furmark

Graphic Detail : Maximum @ 1680×1050

Again, it’s in between the GTS 450 and GTX 460.

Unigine Heaven 2.0

Graphic Detail : 1680×1050, 4xAA, 16xAF, Tesselation at NORMAL.

In between, but towards the GTS 450.

Operating Temperature

Furmark was used for graphic card stressing.

Readings were taken when ambient temperature was around 25°C.

– Load, Furmark was run for 1 minute at 1680×1050 with 4xAA.
– Stress, Furmark was run under the Stress Test mode for 5 minutes.

I’m quite surprised at the heat level, considering a GTS 450 is pretty close in power consumption and runs cooler but certainly the heatsink performs admirably, only 4° gain on stress.

Power Consumption

A little more details on the maximum power consumption of the GTX 550 based cards.

Reference

Conclusion

Asus has a good product here but in my opinion, the nVidia GPU just doesn’t seem attractive. This is something that plagues all brands, must thanks to nVidia’s nonsense naming again. Usually the a model of the latest generation would perform similarly or better than the previous generation’s next step higher model. One would expect a GTX 550 to perform closely to the GTX 460 but this is not the case.

The GTX 550 is crippled with 192bit bus width, the only plus point against the GTX 460 is that it consumes only about 2/3 the power.

Being the premium brand ASUS is, the GTX 550 based graphic card doesn’t seem that attractive, considering one could acquire a GTX 460 card at same or lesser cost. 🙁 So basically ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU TOP is a good product made unappealing because of nVidia’s GTX 550.