MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone OC Video Card Review

The MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone OC (Cont’d)

In Figure 4, you can see the video card with its cooler removed and, in Figure 5, a close-up of the voltage regulator circuit.

Figure 4: Video card with the cooler removed

The voltage regulator circuit uses solid capacitors, ferrite-core coils (which make the regulator to have higher efficiency because they have lower energy loss than iron-core coils), and low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors (i.e., higher efficiency).

Figure 5: Voltage regulator circuit

The GPU heatsink can be seen in Figures 6 and 7. It has nickel-plated copper base, two five-mm nickel-plated copper heatpipes, aluminum fins, and a 90 mm fan.

Figure 6: The GPU heatsink

Figure 7: The GPU heatsink

NVIDIA decided to use a different memory configuration with the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, using two 2 Gbit chips and four 1 Gbit chips. This allowed the video card to have a 192-bit memory interface (32-bit interface per chip) while maintaining 1 GB GDRR5 memory. The traditional design for a video card with 192-bit interface would be using six 1 Gbit chips, making the video card to have 768 MB instead of 1 GB.

The chips used are four H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C and two H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C parts from Hynix, which support up to 1.25 GHz (5 GHz QDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 1,075 MHz (4.3 GHz QDR), there is still a good 16% margin for you to increase the memory clock rate while keeping the chips inside the maximum they support. Of course you can always try to overclock the memory chips above their specs.

Figure 8: Memory chips

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.