Overall

Zotac used my favorite color liberally on the cooler design and fixed two of my issues with recent Nvidia cards; you would think that I would have nothing to complain about. When doing our SLI testing I overheated the card multiple times. As I mentioned before, the cooler design pushes the fan so close to the next slot that it struggles to get enough air to keep everything nice and cool. Of course, if you have the room to run your SLI setup with one or more slot in between you will be in good shape. Our configuration was a little tight and forced us to run them side by side. Flipping our reference card to the top spot fixed the problem. Single card testing went smoothly, keeping the card cool and quiet.

Outside of our overheating issue Zotac’s GTX550Ti AMP performed amazingly. In every benchmark we put it through it outperformed the reference design considerably. Even more impressive was the performance we saw from the two GTX 550Ti’s paired up in an SLI configuration. With numbers reaching and sometimes surpassing the HD6950 they make a great upgrade path for a gamer on a budget. Or a budget way to get your multi-monitor gaming on with an Nvidia setup. That is as long as you can keep the two cards apart, all the performance in the world does nothing when you have your card overheating.