It is nice to see NVIDIA refreshing its lower end, the GTS 450 never really shone among AMDs lower end cards so the arrival of the GTX 550 seems like a good thing.  Even with such an odd memory configuration, a 192-bit memory interface split into three controllers, two with 256MB of memory available and the third with 512MB, the performance is decent and sits a little slower than what you would expect from a 768MB GTX460 and better than an HD5770 or the older GTS 450.  The problem, as The Tech Report points out, is the price.  At a $149 price point it is not competing with the HD5770 or GTS 450, at that price you can find an HD6850 or a GTX460 with a full 1GB of RAM and both cards are significantly faster than the new GTX 550.


"At $149, is Nvidia’s latest DirectX 11 GPU a compelling step up from cheaper solutions? And could it be a nearly-as-good step down from pricier ones like the GeForce GTX 460 1GB and Radeon HD 6850? TR investigates."

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