Introduction

As a film enthusiast, keeping track of what’s new in the movie industry can be depressing. Once in a while, there is a Pixar movie or a big budget James Cameron title, that pushes the boundaries of storytelling and technology, but often times it is just a bunch of warmed up ideas that should never have been conceived in the first place, like Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Land of the Lost” remake or the upcoming Battleship movie that has a current budget of $200,000,000. That will not be a remake of the classic Eisenstein Battleship Potemkin but is instead a movie based on the Milton-Bradley board game. Hollywood is officially scraping the bottom of the creative barrel. Thankfully, as a tech enthusiast, there is a lot more creativity and quality control poured into the making of a new component so every time a new product is announced, more often than not, it is worth the time to look at it in detail.

Like the film industry, there are billions of dollars riding on every major product release. The difference is that the tech industry is a lot wiser when it comes to spending their investment. Take NVIDIA’s line of video cards, for instance. The 5 series cards are essentially optimized and improved versions of the 4 series, which were a major architectural leap. Intel is currently on a similar trend, alternating between a major architectural change and a heavy optimization and performance improvement with every release. In the case of NVIDIA, their 5 series chips are pin-compatible with the corresponding 4 series chips so that AIBs benefit from saving on production costs. The latest is an update to the GF106 called the GF116, better known as the GTX 550 Ti. These new improved cards can run at much higher clock speeds with lower temperatures, in fact most of NVIDIA’s partners are releasing factory OC’ed versions the day of launch. NVIDIA’s largest video card manufacturing partner EVGA, for example, has the EVGA GTX 550 Ti FPB edition.

The EVGA GTX 550 Ti FPB video card is a major improvement over the GTS 450. The EVGA GTX 550 Ti is factory overclocked at 951 MHz (Core) from the default 900 MHz. The memory clocks are also bumped up on the EVGA GTX 550 Ti FPB to 4356 MHz from the standard 3600 MHz. Like all EVGA video cards, the GTX 550 Ti FPB video card comes bundled with EVGA’s Precision and OC Scanner software. EVGA offers a 3 year warranty on the GTX 550 Ti, which covers parts and labor and can be extended when the video card is registered on EVGA’s website within 30 days of purchase.