The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 series Juggernaut is sinking deep into the market key business area, the mainstream where most money is made, with the newest GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card. While the GeForce GTX 560 Ti launched last month rattled the gamer's sweet spot price range, and it's now up to the GeForce GTX 550 Ti to capture the sub-$200 market as the best option available. That is a huge task, in a market almost saturated with options. The $5 you paid to the toll-booth on your way to the hardware store could determine what graphics card you end up buying. This GeForce 550 Ti is technically somehow just a successor to the GeForce GTS 450, which was trailing a bit behind lately. - techPowerUp

Palit GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB Sonic Graphics Review

The Palit card is following their typical design with red PCB and orange highlights on the cooler. In terms of size the card is one of the smallest GeForce GTX 550 cards we have seen to date. Like all other GeForce GTX 550 Ti boards it requires two slots in your system. You may also combine up to two GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards of any model and vendors into SLI to gain higher performance and game play. Palit's cooler is fairly simple thanks to the low heat output of the GPU and can handle the video card without copper baseplate or fancy heatpipes. This card requires a single 6-pin power connector, which is just enough to handle the card.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti adds yet another item to the quite overcrowded mainstream plate, in the GPU buffet. At the outset, any addition is a good one for the buyers, as it increases consumer choice and tends to affect pricing of other products in the segment, but then it also adds to the confusion. You may have all the world's review data on the back of your mind, but when you stare at a rack of pretty looking graphics card boxes, all in the same price range, it becomes an mind numbing and almost traumatic experience to pick the right card, and often things as trivial as box design affect your choice more than you think.

The GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a good performer for screens sized 22inch and below, that use mid-range high definition resolutions. While NVIDIA perfected its Fermi architecture with the GeForce GTX 500 series allowing for higher clock speeds, it is also coming at higher power draw. This card draws more power on load than a GeForrce GTX 460, the performance per Watt figure took an bigger beating as a result. Overall, these GeForce GTX 550 Ti is a fairly good choice if you can keep track of every other option in this card's proximity. Their partners are selling the GeForce GTX 550 Ti with overclocked speeds at almost no price premium.

It makes for an decently good bargain, but even with overclocked speeds, things don't change much for the GeForce GTX 550 Ti in its competitive neighbourhood. While a smarter move would have been a $140 card that can win in its segment. The Palit GeForce GTX 550 Ti Sonic edition offers very high clock speeds out of the box, which helps the card gain some extra performance on its GeForce GTX 460 brethren. In terms of pricing Palit makes no compromises, their card costs $159, just like the regular clocked design. Palit has optimized the cooler settings well which results in a very low noise card in both idle and full load operation.