 Now this is something I've never had the pleasure of unboxing before. This is an Nvidia branded GeForce GTX. It is a reference card, so it has a completely black box. All on the outside, it's completely black. Better go clean my lens. There, that's better. Okay, so what I want to do is start opening this thing up. It's got a nice glossy branding finish on it to go with the overall matte black box. You can see here something I've never seen on a graphics card box before, and that is designed and built by Nvidia. So we're going to go ahead and open this guy up. We'll find white inside to the box. Alright, now here's something. Dear valued editor, something, something, something. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this off, because I don't know how much of that is confidential. But yeah, okay, so it's telling me a few different things. First of all, that this is equipped with 192 CUDA cores and 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface, which is actually pretty cool because it allows the board partners to mix and match the densities of the memory modules they're putting on so that they can achieve a 1 gig capacity without an even memory bandwidth interface. So that's pretty cool. It has faster clock speeds over the GTS 450. It's younger brother, and it has a little list of what all is going to be included in here. So first we got some stickers, and these are nice stickers. I actually really like these. There's a, you can see there's a bit of a, hmm, it's hard to see that in the camera, but there's a pale, there we go, there we go. There's an Nvidia next to that little logo. We got some Nvidia logos. We got one of their Nvidia characters and a GeForce GTX sticker. Very nice. Okay, we have a driver disc, which is empty. So this is just a reference package that does not contain a driver disc because it shipped out before there was a driver disc available for this particular card. Here's where some accessories would go if there were any included, I suppose. So let's go ahead and pull that out. All right, I've got a GTX 550 TI reviewer's guide, which is highly confidential, and you guys won't be looking at that. And then what do we have down here? We've got a video card, which I will assume at this point, based on the evidence I've seen thus far, is a GeForce GTX 550, and then we have nothing underneath. So this is a retail boxed card that doesn't quite contain a full retail package. Oh, and then, oh, thank you for buying in a bunch of different languages. Very nice. Nice touch. Okay, so let's close up the box, and we'll use that to look at the video card itself. All right. So here it is. This is the GTX 550 TI. It features a very similar look to the 560 TI reference design card. That is the central fan with a flower-style heatsink. So if I spin this, you can see the heatsink a little bit better. And let me see if it's got any heat pipes going on on there. I'm gonna have to try and get a different angle. No, it looks like this one, unlike the 560 TI, does not require a heat pipe cooler for optimal performance. So NVIDIA has opted just for a standard flower heatsink cooler. You can see the shroud is recessed a little bit, just like the 560 TI. So the fan actually sticks up a little bit above the top of the shroud. So one of the things that it's likely that this does is if you're in an SLI configuration, your cards are close together, it should give your fan a little bit more breathing room to pull in air around it and make sure the card stays adequately cool. You can see something here that we've actually seen in the past from NVIDIA cards, and that not all the PCIe pins are present on the bottom connector. That doesn't matter. Actually, all that is, is they've removed some of the unnecessary pins that they don't need. It will not affect performance or the bandwidth available to your card in any way, shape, or form. You can also tell this is an engineering sample card by the fact that the PCIe lock is not broken off here. So this card will not lock into a slot. It has a little piece here that will prevent it from doing so, so it can be easily removed by reviewers. All right, we've got an SLI connector. So this card is SLI ready, but that is two-way SLI and not three-way SLI. Just so you guys are aware, because it's only got a single connector, that means it's only compatible with two-way SLI. On the back, we find the connectors that we're getting pretty used to seeing. We've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI connectors, although please do note you can only use two of any, any two of these three connectors at any given time. If you do install two cards in your system, then you can run three monitors off of the two cards together to run NVIDIA Surround with up to three monitors. Here on the back, you see one of the cool things I was talking about before. One, two, three, four, five, six memory modules, but it's a one gig card. So NVIDIA very cleverly has allowed their partners to use four lower density memory modules and two higher density ones to achieve the five, to achieve the one gig memory capacity. Otherwise, we'd be stuck with one of those odd capacities like we've seen on previous NVIDIA cards, like 768 or 1280, you know, those, those sort of oddball memory capacities. But NVIDIA has engineered the card to have excellent memory bandwidth. So they've increased it from 128-bit to 192-bit, but they've also managed to keep a nice round number on the memory capacity. So there you go. That's kind of cool. It also helps the board partners achieve slightly lower board costs by using these lower density chips to get up to that capacity. So it really is a win-win-win for everyone. The consumer gets more bandwidth, gets more memory, and the board partners save on some cost. And NVIDIA's engineers are clearly pretty clever right about now. So right here, we've got a PCI Express six-pin connector. So that is the only external power that this card requires. We can also clearly see the four-pin PWM fan connector for that fan, for the heatsink. We can also see the power delivery in there. So fairly basic. There's no active cooling on the power. Well, okay, there's act, okay, there's no heatsinks on the power circuitry, but what we do have is a fair amount of airflow is going to be coming from the fan and going over the power connect, or the power circuitry, because there is absolutely nothing restricting the airflow out this way. So what that means is that the GTX 550 Ti is going to be a fairly internal exhaust card. Because you can see here, right along the entire top of the shroud, there's a fairly substantial gap that's going to allow air to come out this way, cool these memory chips, cool anything up here along the card. Same thing along the bottom. You're going to see there's a fairly substantial gap there. So while we're going to be exhausting some of the air out of the backplate, most of it is going to be coming out the top, the bottom, and the back of the card. Like maybe 20% of it is going to be externally exhausted. Now, this isn't going to be a very hot running card, so I don't think that's going to be a huge problem for you. One last thing I should probably go over before we end here is that it does support all of the usual NVIDIA technology. So we've got CUDA, 3D Vision, I already mentioned SLI, I already mentioned NVIDIA Surround, but all of that good stuff is supported. This is a gaming-grade card. It's targeted at people who are playing at 1680x1050 or lower. So don't expect to be, you know, grabbing one of these if you're running on a huge 30-inch monitor or anything like that. But it is a gaming-grade, sort of an entry-level performance-grade card. So thank you for checking out my unboxing of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti, or Ti if you prefer. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Erk, I forgot to mention PhysX, and I also wanted to mention just the clock speeds of this particular card. So it's clocked at 900 MHz, which is substantially higher than the old GTS 450, but the actual power consumption of the card has only gone up slightly. So I'm really looking forward to getting this guy on the test bench. Once again, don't forget to subscribe.