 This video marks the launch of a couple of interesting things. So this is the MSI GTX 550 Ti, or Ti, which is a 1GB brand new video card, brand new GPU from Nvidia. And it also marks the introduction of the Cyclone 2. So the Cyclone cooler was incredibly popular, still is incredibly popular on the previous generation cards from MSI, but it looks like they've made some improvements to it, and they've made enough improvements to call it an upgraded Cyclone 2. So let's find out what's up with the Cyclone 2 once we get things opened up. First of all, this is an OC edition card, so that means it is factory overclocked. It is ready for 3DMark 11, which is one way of saying it is a DirectX 11 card. It's compatible with MSI Afterburner, which is awesome. It's overclocking utility, monitoring temps, all that good stuff. It supports CUDA, SLI, PhysX, 3D Vision, as well as Nvidia Surround if you run two of them together. It uses MSI's military class concept, including solid state chokes and solid caps for no coil wine and up to 10 years lifetime. We've also got a 3 year warranty in the USA and Canada. Oh, and here's one interesting difference between the Cyclone and the Cyclone 2. The propeller blade now allows for up to 20% more airflow. Interesting. Yes. Okay, what do we got in here? Okay, more of the same stuff. Right. Oh, here's some specs on the Cyclone 2. Here we go. So 9cm PWM fan, up to 40% more airflow to cool down the GPU memory and power modules all at once. Multiple heat pipes, so it has, it looks like two heat pipes through the window there, though it's hard to say yet. Hybrid heat sink design, so it combines aluminum extrusion, heat pipes, and fins for maximum cooling. Nickel plated copper base, rounded design. Okay, oh, prevents dust accumulation. I did not know that. Ultimate low noise. Yes, that I knew. The Cyclone's, the original Cyclone was a very, very low noise cooler. And propeller blade, so that provides up to 20% more airflow versus a traditional design. It's based on the same thermal mode with the same RPM. Interesting. Okay, so let's go ahead and get this box opened up. Don't see anything particularly fascinating on the back. Let's see, it's a PCI Express 16x card. It requires a minimum 400W or greater system power supply, with a minimum 12V current rating of 24A, and everything else on there is fairly irrelevant. Yeah. Alright, this is an interesting way of packing the card. I don't know if this is a retail card, just so you guys know, so I'm not quite sure if the retail cards will come like this. This is a Tech Tips card, but there you go. It is, well, you know what, look, okay, let's not fault them for their methods. Let's evaluate based on what was the objective and did they achieve it. The objective was keep the card in place and protect it during shipping, and they did achieve it. However inelegantly. Alright. Look at the accessories. We've got a 2MoleX to single 6-pin PCIe power adapter. We've got one of them little mini HDMI to full-size HDMI adapters. That could be useful, it's very cute TVs have a native mini HDMI cable. We've got a DVI to VGA adapter, which, by the way, I know I'm always knocking the DVI to VGA adapter, but for this particular card, very appropriate, because you may have an older VGA monitor that you would want to run off this card because it's low-res and this card is going to be optimized for 1680x1050 or below. That's the kind of price point that this card exists in. So hold on, let's see if we've got anything else down here. Yes, we do. MSI hides their driver CD since they know that you should probably not use it. You should throw it away and download the latest off the Nvidia website. And we've also got a little guide for something, yeah, okay, and then a quick user's guide, which basically shows you how to install a PCIe card. But if you watch Linus Tech Tips, then you probably already know that because I have covered that in the past. Alright, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to flip this over and that'll make a nice little platform for my card. And let's get the 560 Ti or Ti onto the platform so we can check it out. Alright, so the first thing, the most noticeable thing about this new Cyclone II cooler to me is that they've added like a little like blade-style shroudy thing on it. So each one of these actually kind of looks like the blade of a curved sword or something like that. And that's the effect they're going for because they've got like these little jaggy things here, right there, which would be pretty nasty if you were cutting someone open with them. So that's a very aggressive look to the cooler itself. The overall design of it looks fairly similar to the original Cyclone and in that it has the normal flower heat sink here, it's got the heat pipes, and then those heat pipes are used to carry heat out to this nice, dense fin array. So what that means is we're not wasting any of the cooling capacity of this fan. So any air that's blown downward is going to be cooling the GPU through the aluminum fins here, and any air that is blown out to the side is going to be cooling the GPU because the heat pipes are going to be carrying the heat up to these fins, and then it can carry the heat out this way, out this way, and in every which way. MSI over the reference design has also added a couple other things. They've actually got a heat sink here on the voltage regulators, and you're going to see that that's going to get a ton of airflow from this fan when it spins. It'll just be blowing over those heat sinks. I don't think we'll have to worry about those running warm at all. And they've also added a little stiffening plate, so this is interesting. You can see right here, a little MSI branded plate, and it looks like what that's for is just to hold the PCB rigid when you've got it installed in your case because it's not really connected to anything else, and that's something that I really felt should be included with more graphics cards, sorry, especially as they start to get heavier and heavier. All right, let's start taking off these little protective covers. Off the DVI port, off the SLI connector, off the mini HDMI, there we go. Okay, so another thing I wanted to point out about this card right here is that you can see that some of the pins on the PCI Express connector appear to be missing. This is by design. This is not a defect in your card. These are unnecessary for performance and bandwidth, and NVIDIA has deemed them to be perfectly fine to remove. The card is still PCI Express compliant, so you don't have to worry about any motherboard compatibility issues or anything like that. The Cyclone 2 fan is actually a 4-pin PWM controlled fan, and I don't know what the noise characteristics of it are like, but if it's anything like the old one, it's probably a pretty, pretty deece fan. Here we've got a 6-pin PCI Express power connector. That's all we're going to need as far as external power goes for the GTX 550 Ti or TI. On the back of the card, we actually see one of the cooler innovations that NVIDIA has brought about with the GTX 550 Ti. They've actually given their board partners the capability of mixing and matching different capacities of memory on the card. So I'm not sure which ones are which, but my guess would be that these four are all totaling up to 512 megs, and these two together are 512 megs to give us our 1 gig capacity, because the 550 Ti has a 192-bit memory interface, which is significantly more than any other previous generation card in this price bracket, but it only has six memory modules. So how does it have a 1 gig capacity, which would imply that it would have to have either four or eight memory modules? Well, it's because they're mixing and matching the capacities to give us that extra bandwidth, but also that extra, that nice round, even capacity. So that's a pretty neat thing that NVIDIA has brought about on this generation of cards. Here at the back, we find something we're pretty used to seeing on MSI cards and NVIDIA cards in general. We've got two DVI ports, one mini HDMI port, and only two of these three can be used at any given time. If you do run two 550 Ti's, you can run three monitors off of the two cards together, but for an individual card, you're either using DVI DVI, DVI mini HDMI, or DVI mini HDMI. We've also got our typical MSI branded exhaust port here, although with Cyclone Cooler, not a whole lot of the exhaust is going to be going to the outside of the case, anyhow, due to the design of the cooler. The 550's a fairly low power consumption, low heat output card, though, so I wouldn't worry too much about the overall case temperatures being affected by having the exhaust going out into your case. The SLI connector is up here, and as you can see, there's only one of them, so that's going to support two-way SLI, but not three-way or four-way SLI. I mean, really, honestly, those features would be pretty unnecessary on a card at this price point anyway. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 550 Ti from MSI, featuring the Cyclone II cooler. 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