Nvidia Geforce GTX 550 Ti was launched to fill out mainstream Geforce 500 series, i.e. the price range between €120 and €150.

Geforce GTX 550 Ti is not a replacement for Geforce GTS 450, although it’s worth mentioning that the latter’s GPU (GF106) is pin to pin compatible with GF116.

We expected to see GTX 550 Ti cards compete with HD 5770 both in price and performance, but Nvidia decided to launch its GTX 550 Ti with a higher price tag. You can find GTX 550 Ti cards for around €120. Unfortunately, the same goes for HD 6850 which is, unfortunately for Nvidia, faster than GTX 550 Ti.

Almost all partners, PoV/TGT included, overclocked their cards in order to juice them up for the performance fight ahead. We tested a special GTX 550 Ti card dubbed the Beast, and the card comes from Point of View and TGT overclocking team. The Beast’s GPU is up from reference 900MHz to 1013MHz while the memory is up from 1026MHz to 1106MHz.

PoV/TGT did a good job with factory overclocking so GTX 550 Ti Beast will be a faithful servant at 1680x1050, as well as at 1920x1080 with maximum settings in most games.

Still, the Beast is plagued by the same downside like the original – it’s price is simply too high when compared to the competition – the HD 6850. PoV/TGT overclocked GTX 550 Ti cards can be found here.

GTX 550 Ti Beast’s cooling keeps temperatures below 75°C, where the fan is almost inaudible, which is great. Just like the reference card, the card boasts two dual-link DVIs and one mini-HDMI connector.

All in all, GTX 550 Ti Beast is a good graphics card that performs well. However, it must be said that it inherited the main negative trait from the original card, which is the price.