Gadgetory

this video marks the launch of a couple of interesting things so this is the msi gtx 550 ti or ty which is a one gig brand new video card brand new GPU from nvidia and it also marks the introduction of the cyclone - so the cyclone cooler was incredibly popular still is incredibly popular on the lat previous generation cards from msi but it looks like they've made some improvements to it and they've made enough improvements to call it an upgraded cyclone - so let's find out what's up with the cyclone - once we get things opened up first of all this is an OC edition card so that means it is factory overclocked it is ready for 3d mark 11 which is one way of saying it is a DirectX 11 card it's compatible with MSI Afterburner which is awesome its overclocking utility monitoring temps all that good stuff it supports CUDA SLI physics 3d vision as well as invidious around if you run two of them together it uses MSI's military class concept including solid state chokes and solid caps for no coil line and up to 10 years lifetime we've also got a three year warranty in the USA and Canada oh and here's one interesting difference between the cyclone and the cyclone - the propeller blade now allows for up to 20% more airflow interesting yes okay what do we got in here okay more of the same stuff right oh you're some specs on the cyclone - here we go so 9 centimeter pwm fan up to 40% more airflow to cool down the GPU memory and power modules all at once multiple heat pipes so it has it looks like 2 heat pipes through the window there though it's hard to say yet hybrid heatsink design so it combines aluminum extrusion heat pipes and fins for maximum cooling nickel plated copper base rounded design okay well prevents dust accumulation okay none of that ultimate low noise yes that I knew the cyclones of the original cyclone was a very very low noise cooler and propeller blade so that provides up to 20 percent more airflow versus a traditional designs based on the same thermal mode with the same rpm interesting okay so go ahead and get this box opened up don't see anything particularly fascinating on the back see it's a PCI Express 16x card it requires a minimum 400 water greater system power supply with a minimum 12 volt current reading of 24 amps and everything else on there is fairly irrelevant yeah all right this is an interesting way of packing the cart I don't know if this is a retail card just so you guys know so I'm not quite sure if the retail cards will come like this this is a tech tips card but there you go it is phat well you know what look okay let's not fault them for their methods let's let's evaluate based on what was the objective and did they achieve it the objective was keep the card in place and protect it during shipping and they did achieve it however in elegantly alright look at the accessories we've got a 2 molex to single 6 pin PCIe power adapter we've got one of them little mini HDMI 2 full-sized HDMI adapters that could be useful as very few TVs have a native mini HDMI cable we've got a DVI to VGA adapter which by the way I know I'm always knocking the DVI to VGA adapter but for this particular card very appropriate because you may have an older VGA monitor that you would want to run off this card because it's low res and this card is going to be optimized for 1680 by 1050 or below that's the kind of price point that this card exists in so let's see if we've got anything else down here yes we do msi hides their driver CD since they know that you should probably not use it you should throw it away and download the latest off the nvidia website and we've also got a little guy for something ok and then a quick user's guide which basically shows you how to install a PCIe card but if you watch Linus tech tips then you probably already know that because I have that in the past alright so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to flip this over and that'll make a nice little platform for my card and let's get the 560 Ti or tie on to platform so we can check it out alright so the first thing the most noticeable thing about this about this new cyclone tube cooler to me is that they've added like a little like blade style shroud II thing on it so each one of these actually kind of looks like the like the blade of a curved sword or something like that and I think that's the effect they're going for because they got like these little these little shaggy things here right there which would be pretty nasty if you were cutting someone open with them so that's a very aggressive look to the cooler itself the overall design of it looks fairly similar to the original cyclone and in that it has the the normal flower heat sink here it's got the heat pipes and then those heat pipes are used to carry heat out to this nice dense fin array so what that means is we're not wasting any of the cooling capacity of this fan so the any air that's blown downward is going to be cooling the GPU through the aluminum fins here and any air that is blown out to the side is going to be cooling the GPU because the heat pipes are going to be carrying the heat up to these fins and then it can carry the heat out this way out this way and in every which way ms:i over the reference design has also added a couple other things they've actually got a heat sink here on the voltage regulators and you're gonna see that that's going to get a ton of air flow from this fan when it spins it'll just be blowing over those heat sinks I don't think we'll have to worry about those running warm at all and they've also added a little stiffening plate so this is interesting you can see right here little NSI branded plate and it looks like what that's for is just to hold the PCB rigid when you've got it installed in your case because it's not really connected to anything else and that's something that I've really felt should be included with more graphics cards sorry especially as they start to get heavier and heavier all right let's start taking off these little protective covers EBI poor it's off the SLI connector off the mini HDMI there we go okay so another thing I wanted to point out about this car right here is that you can see that some of the pins on the PCI Express connector appear to be missing this is by design this is not a defect in your card these are unnecessary for performance and bandwidth and NVIDIA has deemed them to be perfectly fine to remove the card is still PCI Express compliant so you don't have to worry about any motherboard compatibility issues or anything like that the cyclone 2 fan is actually a 4 pin pwm controlled fan and I don't know what the noise characteristics of it are like but if it's anything like the old one it's probably a pretty pretty decent here we've got a 6 pin PCI Express power connector that's all we're going to need as far as external power goes for the gtx 550 PI or ti on the back of the card we actually see one of the cooler innovations that nvidia has brought about with the gtx 550 ti they've actually given their board partners the capability of mixing and matching different capacities of memory on the card so i'm not sure which ones are which but my guess would be that these four are all totalling up to 512 megs and these two together are 512 Meg's to give us our one gig capacity because the 550 ty has a 192 bit memory interface which is significantly more than any other previous generation card in this price bracket but it only has 6 memory modules so how does it have a one gig capacity which would imply that it would have to have either 4 or 8 memory modules well it's because they're mixing and matching the capacities to give us that extra bandwidth but also that extra that nice round even capacity so that's a pretty neat thing that Nvidia has brought about on this generation of cards here at the back we find something we're pretty used to seeing on MSI cards and NVIDIA cards in general we've got two DVI ports one HTM 1 mini HDMI port and these only 2 of these 3 can be used at any given time if you do run to 550 ty you can run three monitors off of the two cards together but for an individual card yeah they're using DVI DVI DVI mini HDMI or DVI mini HDMI we've also got our typical MSI branded exhaust port here although with cyclone cooler not a whole lot of the exhaust is going to be going to the outside of the case anyhow due to the design of the cooler the 550 is a fairly low power consumption low he--oh heat output card though so I wouldn't worry too much about the overall case temperatures being affected by having the exhaust going out into your case the SLI connector is up here and as you can see there's only one of them so that's going to support two-way SLI but not 3-way or four-way SLI I mean really honestly those features would be pretty unnecessary on a card at this price point anyway so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the geforce gtx 550 ti from msi featuring the cyclone 2 cooler don't 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