Legit Video Card Reviews

ASUS Ultimate GeForce GTX 550 Ti Video Card Review

Manufacturer: ASUS
Product: ASUS UL ENGTX550 Ti DC/DI/1GD5
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 - 12:00 PM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Temperature Testing

Since video card temperatures and the heat generated by next-generation cards have become an area of concern among enthusiasts and gamers, we want to take a closer look at how the graphics cards do at idle and under a full load.

ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti DirectCU Video Card Idle Temperature:

ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti Video Card GPU-Z 0.5.1 Details

As you can see from the screen shot above, the ASUS Ultimate GeForce GTX 550 Ti had power idle states of 50.6MHz on the GPU core clock and 135MHz on the memory. These clocks combined with the custom ASUS designed cooler showed that we had an idle temperature of just 29C in a room with a temperature of 21C.

We fired up FurMark and ran the stability at 640x480, which was enough to put the GPU core at 100% load in order to get the highest load temperature possible. This application also charts the temperature results so you can see how the temperature rises and levels off, which is very nice. The fans on the video card was left on auto during temperature testing. When we hit the space bar to stop the rendering the temperature dropped.

ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti DirectCU Video Card Load Temperature:

ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti DirectCU Video Card Load Temp

The ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti 1GB peaked at 76C according to Furmark, but we noticed that the fan speed and noise barely budged. The fan on the ASUS Ultimate GeForce GTX550 Ti couldn't be heard over our Titan Finrar CPU cooler, so it's pretty darn quiet.

ASUS Ultimate GTX550 Ti DirectCU Video Card Load Temp

One thing that shocked us is that at full load with the card at 75-76C that the fan wasn't loud at all. We opened up GPU-Z and it showed the fan was running at 35% at only 1600 RPMs. The ASUS Ultimate GTX 550 runs at 12% fan speed at idle and 1400RPM, so the fan speed difference between idle and load is just 200 RPM!  If you want better cooling performance you can manually increase the fan speed with an application like EVGA Precision.

Next Page - Power Consumption


Review Index
Page 1 - The ASUS Ultimate GeForce GTX550-Ti
Page 2 - Retail Box and Bundle
Page 3 - The Test System
Page 4 - Aliens vs. Predator
Page 5 - Just Cause 2
Page 6 - Metro 2033
Page 7 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Page 8 - H.A.W.X. 2 Benchmark
Page 9 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 10 - 3DMark 11
Page 11 - Unigine 'Heaven' DX11
Page 12 - FurMark 1.8.2
Page 13 - Temperature Testing
Page 14 - Power Consumption
Page 15 - GeForce GTX 550 Ti Overclocking
Page 16 - Final Thoughts & Conclusions