Packing a GeForce GTX 550 Ti GPU each, we have a pair of N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II video cards that we are going to evaluate against a Radeon HD 6950, GeForce GTX 570 and even an overclocked GeForce GTX 560 Ti. At a total cost of only $260 we will find out if this dual-GTX 550 Ti action has what it takes to compete.

Established in 1986, MSI has become one of the top motherboard and video card manufacturer’s in the world. From its base of operations in the capital of Taiwan, its product lines have grown to include optical drives, notebooks, netbooks, barebones computers, tablets, servers, and many others. At its peak, its annual motherboard and video card production capacity reached 32.6 million units combined.

Today, we are examining a combination of MSI video cards. Specifically, we are looking at the MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II 1GD5/OC in an SLI configuration. The goal of this evaluation is to determine whether or not a pair of overclocked GeForce GTX 550s operating in SLI can compete with single-GPU video cards in the $250 to $300 range, since they are price comparable.

Launched on March 15th of 2011, and codenamed GF116, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti is the most affordable member of the GeForce GTX 500 series of GPUs. It was built on a 40nm fabrication process, and is comprised of 1.17 billion transistors packed into a 238mm square ASIC. GF116 features 192 CUDA/shader cores, 32 texture units, and 24 Render Output (ROP) units arranged into 4 shader Streaming Multiprocessors. NVIDIA recommends that the graphics core be clocked at 900MHz, the shader core be clocked at 1.8GHz. The GeForce GTX 550 Ti has a maximum theoretical pixel fill rate of 21.6 billion pixels per second, a maximum texture fill rate of 28.8 billion texels per second.

• READ MORE (Source): HARDOCP – Introduction – MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II SLI Video Card Review