Technical data / specifications

At a first glance one can see that the ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU TOP is everything else but not a card according to NVIDIAs reference design. Therefore you'll see an ASUS' dual slot cooler. In this case they decided to strap a DirectCU block onto the card which should be able to deliver lower temperatures at a lower noise level compared to the reference cooler. Furthermore the its build quality is also on a good level. Mainly this cooler consists of aluminium except of the two 8 millimeter heatpipes which transport the heat to the numerous fins. ASUS also overworked the PCB, capacitors and power circuitry. For example you get high quality SAP caps which run cooler and have a longer lifespan.
Last but not least this card comes with a factory overclocking of 75 MHz. Instead of 900 MHz, the GPU now runs at 975 MHz default. Regarding the memory you wont find a factory overclocking. The GDDR5 chips run on standard frequencies.

	ASUS GTX 550 Ti DirectCU TOP	nVidia GTX 550 Ti	Gigabyte GTX 460 SOC	nVidia GTX 275
Chip	GF116	GF116	GF104	GT200
Process	40 nm	40 nm	40 nm	55 nm
Transistors	1.170 billion	1.170 billion	1.950 billion	1.400 billion
GPU clock	975 MHz	900 MHz	815 MHz	633 MHz
Shader clock	1'950 MHz	1'800 MHz	1'630 MHz	1'404 MHz
Memory	1024 MB GDDR5	1024 MB GDDR5	1024 MB GDDR5	896 MB GDDR3
Memory clock	1026 MHz	1026 MHz	1000 MHz	1134 MHz
Memory interface	192 Bit	192 Bit	256 Bit	448 Bit
Memory bandwidth	98'500 MB/s	98'500 MB/s	128'000 MB/s	127'00 MB/s
Shader Cores	192	192	256	240
ROPs	24 ROP	24 ROP	32 ROP	28 ROP
Shader model	SM 5	SM 5	SM 5	SM 4
Maximum board power	116 Watt	116 Watt	200 Watt	219 Watt
Price	$169	$159	$249	$249

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Unigine Heaven / Stone Giant
Page 2 - Specifications	Page 8 - World in Conflict / Resident Evil 5
Page 3 - Preview	Page 9 - Call of Juarez / Far Cry 2
Page 4 - Overclocking	Page 10 - Casual Gaming
Page 5 - Testing conditions	Page 11 - Conclusion
Page 6 - Futuremark

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