Based in Hong Kong, Zotac has been around since 2006 and entered the market with an expanded lineup of NVIDIA powered graphics cards, which includes their passive cooled Zone editions and the class leading overclocked AMP! editions, in addition to the standard GeForce series lineup. They have tried to bring the latest DirectX 11 technology to rather every price point with the current king of the hill being the GeForce GTX 590 currently priced at $749 shipped down to the entry level GeForce GTX 550 Ti series. Doing so they got a wide range of products which will please almost everyone, and with their AMP! version being designed with these overclockers in mind given them an extra boost in performance. - LegitReviews

Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! Edition Card Review

The front of the board has an sharp looking black and dark yellow almost orange theme with black plastic and yellow painted metal mesh. The front of this card has a single 75cm fan set right above the heatsink attached to the GPU chipset. No exotic heatpipes or other extreme cooling solutions for the entry level GPU of the GeForce GTX 500 series. The back of the board is a typical PCB in black to keep the black and yellow theme going. Zotac has modified the reference design to include a port for DisplayPort connectivity. If you look at the other side of the graphics card you can see the fan stacked on top of the large heatsink.

Zotac overclocks this video card at the factory pushing this GeForce GTX 550 Ti to 1000MHz core and 4400MHz for memory clock speed. While Zotac pushed this card above the reference clocks from the factory, we wanted to see if there was any more gas left in the tank. In order to push this card further we used the included Firestorm software but it does not have a voltage adjustment option. We tried pushing with another software that does have the voltage slider but did not get any different results at maximum voltage, so we are assuming that Firestorm might be increasing the voltage in the background somehow.

We have to say that Zotac took an entry level graphics card and turned it into an attractive package with a dash of overclocking and silent cooling. While the Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti AMP! version struggles to perform at its highest supported resolution it's not actually targeted for those users and is really meant for gamers running mid-range resolutions and below. It was actually playable in a few of the games with the visual settings turned up which shows how well the Fermi chips work regardless of the number of active cores. We liked the looks of these cards and with the new trend of budget cases with bling it would add nice visuals.

Given this video card is near silent when running games at the edges of the cards performance shows that Zotac did put some thought into the cooling solution. The low power draw and 3 year warranty are also in the plus category. Finally the price after rebate is $125, making it affordable for those on very tight budgets and with back to school time happening now, we are sure student gamers would be happy to pick one of these up. Overall we liked this card for the market it is going after, the budget gamers. Zotac is bringing this chip to the masses in a sleek package and overclocked while priced only a few dollars more.