The Card

While the GTX 550 Ti we're looking at today is part of the DirectCU series, it's not like the HD 6950 we looked at which carries a triple slot cooler. This one instead only takes two which we're a lot more accustomed to.

Looking around the card, you're not going to see anything out of the ordinary. We've got a single 6-Pin PCI-E power connector at the back of the card while closer to front we've got a single SLI connector. Connectivity includes a Dual-Link DVI, VGA and HDMI connector.

Specifications

Being part of the TOP series of course means the GTX 550 Ti comes overclocked out of the box. A reference GTX 550 Ti carries with it a 900MHz core clock, 1800MHz Shader clock and the 1GB of GDDR5 comes in at 4104MHz QDR.

While ASUS hasn't moved the memory clock, they have moved the core up to a healthy 975MHz. This isn't the fastest out of the box clocks we've seen to date, though, so we took the chance to overclock the card to see just what we could get out of it.

We ended up with the core at a very healthy 1050MHz. This pushed the Shader clock to 2100MHz and we pushed the memory up too 4312MHz QDR.