The Card

Looking at the card initially, you won't find anything too different to what we've seen before from mid-range cards and the Cyclone series. Looking a bit closer at the cooler and you can see a bit more of an aggressive styling which looks great. The cooler looks like it will deliver as always, thanks to those heat pipes coming out the top, but we'll find out later exactly what kind of temps are on offer.

As for the rest of the card, we've got a single 6-Pin PCI-E connector at the back of the card along with a single SLI connector across the top. Connectivity comes in the form of two Dual-Link DVI connectors along with a single Mini-HDMI port. As we mentioned on the previous page, a HDMI to Mini-HDMI convertor is included in the bundle.

Specifications

The MSI GTX 550 Ti Cyclone II is an overclocked model, so the clocks are slightly up from the default. A reference designed card will come in with a 900MHz core clock, while the 192 CUDA Cores carry a 1800MHz clock.

On the memory front we've got 1GB of GDDR5 which seems to have become the norm these days. That carries a clock of 4104MHz QDR. Some specifications shared between all GTX 550 Ti cards are 32 Texture Units, 24 ROP Units, 192-bit memory bus and a 40nm fab process.

MSI carries with it an increased core speed which bumps up the Shader clock. Fortunately they've also chosen to increase the memory speed which you can see below.

The core on the MSI GTX 550 Ti Cyclone II comes in at 950MHz; this bumps the Shader clock to 1900MHz while the memory has been bumped to 1075MHz which translates to 4300MHz QDR.