NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Debut: ZOTAC, MSI and Asus
Before bringing this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points--namely power consumption and noise. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and while under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the graphics cards alone.
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Despite offering better performance than the GeForce GTS 450 all around, the GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards consumed similar or less power. The higher-clocked ZOTAC GTX 550 pulled a bit more power than the GTS 450 under load, but the different is tiny at best and well worth the additional performance. At idle, all of the cards were within a couple of watts of one another.
As we mentioned earlier, all of the cards remained cool and quiet throughout testing as well. The custom coolers on all of the GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards we tested here, in conjunction with their relatively low power consumption, results in relatively low temps (the cards were just warm to the touch after hours of benchmarking) and quiet operation. There wasn't a single point where the GeForce GTX 550 Ti was audible over the ambient noise produced by our PSU and CPU cooling fans.
