Gadgetory

now this is something I've never had the pleasure unboxing before this is an Nvidia branded GeForce GTX it is a reference card so it has a completely black box all on the outside is completely black better go clean my lens there that's better okay so what we want I want to do is start opening this thing up it's got a nice glossy branding finish on it to go with the overall matte black box you can see here something I've never seen on a graphics card box before and that is designed and built by and Vidya so we're going to go ahead open this guy up we find a white inside to the box all right now here's something dear valued editor something something something so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this off because I don't know how much of that is confidential but yeah okay so it's telling me a few different things first of all that this is equipped with 192 cuda cores and 192 bit gd-r gd-r 5 memory interface which is actually pretty cool because it allows the board partners to mix and match the densities of the memory modules they're putting on so that they can achieve a one gig capacity without an even memory bandwidth interface so that's pretty cool has faster clock speeds over the GTS 450 it's younger brother and it has a little list of what all is going to be including here so first we got some stickers and these are nice stickers I actually really like these there's a you can see there's a bit of a mmm it's hard to see that in the camera but there's a pail there we go there we go there's an Nvidia next to that little logo we've got some Nvidia logos we've got one of their Nvidia characters and a GeForce GTX sticker very nice ok we have a driver disc which is empty so this is just a reference package that does not contain a driver disc because it shipped out before there was a driver disc available for this particular card here's where some accessories would go if there were any included I suppose so let's go ahead and pull that up alright I've got a gtx 550 guy reviewers guide which is highly confidential and you guys won't be looking at that and then what do we have down here we've got a video card which I will assume at this point based on the evidence I've seen thus far is a geforce gtx 550 and then we have nothing underneath so this is a retail boxed card that doesn't quite contain a full retail package oh wow thank you for buying it a bunch of different language is very nice nice touch okay so let's close up the box and we'll use that we will at the video part itself alright so here it is this is the gtx 550 ti it features a very similar look to the 560 TI reference design card that is the central fan with a flower style heatsink so if i spin this you can see the heatsink a little bit better and let me see if it's got any heat pipes going on on there i have to try and get a different angle no it looks like this one unlike the 560 TI does not require a heat pipe cooler for optimal performance so nvidia has opted just for a standard flower heatsink cooler you can see the shroud is recessed a little bit just like the 560 TI so the fan actually sticks up a little bit above the top of the shroud so one of the things that it's likely that this does is if you're in an SLI configuration your cards are close together it should give your fan a little bit more breathing room to pull an air around it and make sure the card stays adequately cool you can see something here that we've actually seen in the past from Nvidia cards and that not all the PCIe pins are present on the bottom connector that doesn't matter actually all that is is they've removed some of the unnecessary pins that they don't need it will not affect performance or the bandwidth available to your card in any way shape or form you can also tell this is an engineering sample card by the fact that the PCI Express lock is not broken off here so this card will not lock into a slot it has a little piece here that will prevent it from doing so so it can be easily removed by reviewers alright we've got an SLI connector so this card is SL I'm ready but that is two-way SLI and not 3-way SLI just so you guys are aware because it's only got a single connector that means it's only compatible with two-way SLI on the back we find the connectors that we're getting pretty used to seeing we've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI connectors although please do note you can only use two of any any two of these three connectors at any given time if you do install two cards in your system then you can run three monitors off of the two cards together to run Nvidia surround with up to three monitors here on the back you see one of the cool things I was talking about before one two three four five six memory modules but it's a one gig card so Nvidia very cleverly has allowed their partners to use four lower density memory modules and two higher density ones to achieve the five to achieve the one gig memory capacity otherwise we'd be stuck with one of those odd capacities like we've seen on previous Nvidia cards like 768 or 1280 you know those sort of oddball memory capacities but NVIDIA has engineered the card to have excellent memory bandwidth so they've increased it from 128-bit to 192 bit but they've also managed to keep a nice round number on the memory capacity so there you go that's kind of cool it also helps the board partners achieve slightly lower board costs by using these lower density chips to to get up to that capacity so it really is a win win win for everyone the consumer gets more bandwidth gets more memory and the board partners save on some cost and in videos engineers are fairly pretty clever right about now so right here we've got a PCI Express 6 pin connector so that is the only external power that this card requires we can also clearly see the four pin PWM fan connector for that fan for the heatsink we can also see the power delivery in there so fairly basic there's no active cooling on the power well okay there's act ok there's no heat sinks on the power circuitry but what we do have is a fair amount of airflow is going to be coming from the fan and going over the power connect or the power circuitry because there is absolutely nothing restricting the airflow out this way so what that means is that the gtx 550 ti is going to be a fairly internal exhaust card because you can see here right along the entire top of the shroud there's a fairly substantial gap that's going to allow air to come out this way cool these memory chips cool anything up here along the card same thing along the bottom you're going to see there's a fairly substantial gap there so well we're going to be exhausting some of the air out of the back plate most of it is going to be coming out the top the bottom and the back of the card like maybe 20% of it is going to be extremely exhausted now this isn't going to be a very hot running card so I don't think that's going to be a huge problem for you one last thing I should probably go over before we end here is that it does support all of the usual Nvidia technology so we've got CUDA 3d vision I already mentioned SL i already mentioned invidious around but all of that good stuff is supported this is a gaming grade part it's targeted at people who are playing at 1680 by 1050 or lower so don't expect to be you know grabbing one of these if you're running on a huge 30-inch monitor or anything like that but it is a gaming grade sort of a entry level performance grade card so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the geforce gtx 550 ti or ty if you prefer don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos Kirk I forgot to mention physics and I also wanted to mention the just the clock speeds of this particular card so it's clocked at 900 megahertz which is substantially higher than the old GTS 450 but the actual power consumption of the card has only gone up slightly so I'm really looking forward to getting this guy on the test bench once again don't forget to subscribe