[C]urious - GTX550Ti Refurbs @ MC

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PGHammer

2[H]4U
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I bought 2 of the 560Ti refurbs when they were $79....have been very happy with them. :)
 
zero2dash said:
I bought 2 of the 560Ti refurbs when they were $79....have been very happy with them. :)
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Yeah i got the same deal with them. The box has no instructions though. Make sure you have the right inputs. The 560Ti's had a mini hdmi which was not supplied with the card.
 
unusualfire said:
Yeah i got the same deal with them. The box has no instructions though. Make sure you have the right inputs. The 560Ti's had a mini hdmi which was not supplied with the card.
Click to expand...

The same is true of the 550Tis (I grabbed the last one Rockville, MD had this morning) - for now, this is a quibble. (Until I can wangle a mini-HDMI/regular-HDMI adapter, I put my XFi XtremeGamer back in.)

My particular GTX550Ti is one of the open-box ones (which went for a mere $63.46 - including tax), and replaced a VisionTek HD5450 iSilence. Like all GTX cards, this is a two-slot card; hence it's twice as wide as the iSilence it replaced. However, it's no longer - which means that LENGTH should not be a problem. Due to the two-slot design, it eats the (unused) PCIe x1 slot immediately below the single PCIe x16 slot and snuggles up close to the PCI slot - however, given the XtremeGamer's low-profile design, airflow for either card is unaffected - a major relief for mATX or other non-ATX motherboards or SFF cases.

I'll be doing some shakedown testing tonight and tomorrow.

Follow-up: Okay, I knew I was affected by GPU lag with the HD5450 in quite a few games - apparently, I underestimated (severely) just how badly I was affected. The one game I used for the majority of my shakedown tests last night is THE game I play most often - DC Universe Online. (It's an MMO that has been F2P for two years now.) I *had* been playing at 1280x720 with medium detail settings and with everything else (AA, AF. etc.) turned off. Between GeForce Experience (installed with the 320.49 drivers) and the automatic in-game settings adjuster, I found myself at 1920x1080 with everything firewalled except shadows and AA. And the lag I that I used to have to deal with was gone. That woke me up - big time. So, I went into the game settings and firewalled those last two in-game settings - basically, now everything is maxed out - and went back to *work*. (I did the shakedown in South Gotham, AKA Jared's Paradise - it's where Brainiac's forces build the various Sub-Avatars. "Jared's Paradise" came about because Jared was the longtime spokesperson for Subway. It's "big dog" territory - everything here requires - at minimum - a level 30 character to take down.) So, now, with everything maxed, I found that I *still* had absolutely positively zero lag. In other words, the Lag Monster is definitively dead. I'll be doing more testing (and in other games) over the weekend.

Still more follow-up reportage: Just for grins, I ran the Crysis 2 Benchmark Tool against the GTX 550 Ti. (Remember - I'm still pushing the Q6600, as I haven't gotten my Haswell CPU and motherboard yet.) I've gone from 1280x720 and medium LOD to 1920x1080 and my choice of either Extreme LOD and 2xAA/Edge AA or 1920x1080, Ultra LOD and no AA. Yes, the DX11 patch AND the Ultra Textures pack have both been applied, along with the entire rest of the bring-up-to-Maximum Edition spec patches. I'm right around 19 fps, which is plenty playable. Makes me wonder what the moaning and groaning - from folks with FAR more capable hardware! - was about.
 
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