Introduction

Already impressed with what the GTX 550 Ti can do after looking at the MSI Cyclone II edition, it's now time to see what Gainward brings to the table with its highly popular Golden Sample series.

This is a series that's been popular for years and in recent times we've seen them come out hard and fast offering strong cooling solutions, but more importantly fantastic out of the box overclocks that have resulted in excellent performance gains over other models.

When Gainward has chosen to throw the OC tag on a model, especially the Golden Sample one, we know it means that the overclock is going to be strong verses other companies who have thrown the OC tag on and then offered us a small 10MHz core increase.

Gainward today are offering us a core clock that gets into the quadruple digits and it will be interesting to see what that does for performance. Before we get into that and the exact clocks the model carries, we'll first look at the package and then take a closer look at the card itself.

Package

The package is very Gainward with a manual, driver CD, power convertor and a discount voucher for some software you'll probably never use. Really, there's nothing exciting going on here, but we expect that with these cheaper mid-range cards, and to be honest higher end bundles are quite plain as well these days.