Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti Roundup - PAGE 4

To overclock the GTX 550 Ti graphics cards we used the latest MSI Afterburner utility, which allowed us to tweak the voltage level as well as the memory and GPU clock speeds. To test the graphics cards for stability we used the Unigine heaven benchmark with the highest in-game settings, and only considered the clocks stable if it could run the benchmark in its entirety and without pixel issues or crashing.

MSI Overclocking:

The MSI N550GTX-Ti really impressed us with its high overclocking ceiling, as the GPU clock speed could ramp up to 1102Mhz, which is an increase of 14% over the factory setting and a nearly 23% increase over the reference models. The memory on the NGTX550-Ti was also able to clock very well and in the end we pushed it up to 2400MHz (4800MHz effective).

Palit Overclocking:

The Palit Sonic Edition graphics card was also able to be pushed beyond the 1GHz barrier, but unlike the MSI card it was not stable when the GPU clock settings was increased beyond 1100MHz. It played nice with a GPU clock speed of 1079MHz. The memory chips proved to have a higher overclocking ceiling than those used on the MSI model. We were able to increase the memory frequency up to an impressive 2433MHz (4866MHz effective), putting it very close to a maximum rating of 5000MHz.

Both the Palit and MSI graphics cards were able to overclock by a decent margin, especially when taking into consideration that both companies have already pushed the cores beyond the reference specifications.