Introduction

Long ago, I was in the same boat as everyone else when it came to my computer upgrades.There were always 2 routes that I could go down. One was to save up as much as possible and hold out for the best possible upgrade I could manage. However, this usually required a ton of time and effort, as I had to watch a generation of video cards go by in order to save my pennies. The other route was to take whatever budget I currently had and just go for whatever card was the best in that pricing segment. Buying that type of card meant little tweaks and setting changes, in order to get the best possible frame rates. I typically took the latter route, as I am more into online gaming, which has less of a toll on video cards and systems. I also have a bad habit of saving money, then, because of the amount, spending it on something completely different than what I intended.

Last year the GTS 450 was a hot commodity with the budget gamers. Utilizing the new Fermi chips, it was able to make an excellent push into the budget gaming market. The GTS 450 offered tremendous price for performance. Their Fermi architecture also allowed third party manufacturers to push the clock speeds to the extreme and offer amazing overclocked models. The stock core speed of that card was only 783, but because of Fermi, we got warrantied models that pushed 925Mhz. Nvidia was so confident in their 400 series lineup, they dubbed the 450 the "Sniper". Well, the 450's time is almost at an end and there is something new around the corner looking to take it's place. NVidia is calling this one "Sniper-Reloaded".

The ASUS GeForce GTX 550Ti DirectCU TOP can be considered a "Top Sniper". The GTX 550Ti DirectCU TOP takes the 550 to the near extreme. The 550Ti is a re-built 450 to meet the needs of the newest games and gamers. Unlike the 450, the 550Ti now has a 192-bit memory interface, and, because of mixed density GDDR5 chips, still retains the 1GB size. ASUS has increased the core clock speed to 975MHz and added their DirectCU cooling solution on top. The DirectCU cooler has two 8mm flattened copper heat pipes that contact the GPU directly. ASUS has also implemented their Super Alloy Power technology. It's is a special blend used in their power delivery components that will give up to 15% more power, 35 degrees cooler operation, and lengthen the lifespan by 2.5x. There is still 192 CUDA cores and spreads the tesellation load over 4 PolyMorph engines.