Review : Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition

Building a new computer isn’t the easiest of tasks. You’ve got to choose the right processor, RAM, motherboard and most importantly, the graphics card. This is where the Zotac GeForce GTX 500 Ti AMP! Edition comes in to play. It retails for around the £100 mark and offers 1GB of GDDR5 memory.

Also, thanks to the GTX 550 Ti being carefully tweaked and tuned for the best performance possible, it should prove to be a relatively cheap and great performing card. Let’s take a closer look…

Design

The overall look of the card is fairly sharp and attractive with a black and dark yellow colour scheme. Obviously, we’ve got the fan in the centre of the card, a single 75mm fan to be exact. The fan is situated just above the heat sink, which is attached to the GPU.

As you can tell from the image below, the GTX 550 Ti does not feature any fancy heat pipes or advanced cooling solutions, but in terms of power to heat ratio, it shouldn’t need as much cooling as some of the more expensive, and even more powerful, graphics cards.

The rear of the card carries on the black and yellow theme with a completely black board. If you look in the top corner, you can also see the 2-way SLI connection.

Now, ZOTAC have slightly modified the design of the NVIDIA GTX550 Ti, on which the AMP! Edition is based, here so that the AMP! Edition also features a port to make Display Port connectivity possible. As you can see, there are two DVI ports, a HDMI port and the Display Port.

Above these, the hot air from the card will be blown out whilst in use. However, due to the size limitation, some hot air could be blown back in to the PC. If you’ve got decent case airflow, this shouldn’t cause too much of a problem though.

Test System
Processor	AMD Athlon II X4 620    (2.60 GHZ)
Memory	Kingston HyperX   DDR3-2133 ( 2X2GB )
Motherboard	ASUS-M4A785TD-M EVO
Graphics card	Zotac GeForce GTX 550Ti DDR5 – 1GB
Power Supply	Thermaltake Toughpower 650w
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit

Overall, we’ve had a fairly good time with the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition. Obviously, this isn’t a high-end gaming card, but we’ve seen some fairly impressive results for a card that only costs around £100.

There were a few aspects, such as the temperature, which have let the card down slightly with it reaching almost 90 degrees (celcius) whilst under load.

The 550 Ti AMP! has certainly out-performed the previous NVIDIA card, the GeForce GTS 450, but the card does struggle slightly with the most recent DX11 games.

Despite the few aspects that weren’t up to standard, we’d definitely recommend this card for people on a tight budget, but need decent graphics for their gaming needs.

Pros

• Price


• Overclocked


• Can fit in all PCs due to small size

Cons

• Cooling system isn’t brilliant