Nvidia GTX 550 Ti PCB Spotted

Expected to be released on March 15, Nvidia's upcoming mid-range graphics card, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, has been the target of many rumors and suppositions until now, and recently a website has uncovered what seems to be the very first picture of the card's PCB. Taking a good look at the printed circuit board diagram posted by the Czech BonuzWeb website, it becomes apparent that the card is closely related to Nvidia's previous GTS 450 graphics card. This is hardly surprising considering that VR-Zone has stated right from the get go that the card will use the same PCB as the GTS 450, considering both GPU features similar power requirements. As we reported yesterday, the two graphics cards are pretty similar since the GF116-400 core, on which the GTX 550 Ti is presumably based, is actually a fully working version of the GF106 GPU (with some minor improvements) that was used for the GTS 450. I said a “fully working version” because the graphics core that powers the GTS 450 comes with one of the three sets of memory controllers/ROP units disabled, limiting it to a 128bit memory bus with 256KB of L2 cache and 16 ROPs. In comparison, the GF116-400 packs 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus. This is connected to 1GB of GDDR5 memory which is clocked at 4100MHz while the card's GPU runs at 900MHz. The wide memory bus, as well as the improved clocks, allowed Nvidia to nearly double the video buffer bandwidth, as its upcoming mid-range card is rated at 98.4GB/s compared to the 57.7GB/s of the GTS 450. As stated earlier, the GTX 550 Ti is expected to arrive on March 15 for about $151 US while its performance should be below that of the 768MB version of the GTX 460.

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