Nvidia GTX 550 Ti Temperature Problems and Solutions

GTX 550 Ti is a mid-range graphics card which is great (if not perfect) for some more than average gaming. You can compare it directly with GTX+ 9800, which has been a top-end graphics hardware of its time.

However, that time is long gone, but for those gamers who bought it way back when they built their systems, this card (gtx 550 ti) offers a little improvement over their previous card. So before you run off to buy a GTX 550 Ti, you might want to consider the specs and price details of GTX 550 Ti, to know if it is worth upgrading or not.

Problems and Solutions

• There are no serious problems regarding GTX 550 in particular, however, if you do not have sufficient cooling (not some liquid cooled expensive hardware) in your system, then you might want to consider taking a break once in a while.

• The card may hang or crash while playing a significantly resource utilizing game. These games include Crysis 2, Metro 2033, Need for Speed: Shift, Prototype, Left for Dead 2, Call of Duty Black Ops, etc. To sum up, open world games (released in 2010 and 2011, not a rule in particular) will utilize the card to its maximum level and card will hang or may not perform at its best and frames will lag or stutter while playing.

• To avoid such cases, you should optimize settings of your games according to rest of the hardware as well. Do not crank up the settings to their maximum if the only thing that you have nice is ‘graphics card’. Also, you should not play 12 hrs straight. Your system needs only 15 minutes of rest to work at optimum levels again. If you have enough cooling or cross-ventilation in your room, then the time would drop down to 10 minutes only. You should save your game (and every game has this feature) and shut down your computer (not Hibernate, we need every little file closed) and probably, grab a cup of Tea or Coffee.

• Most of the problems regarding Temperature in GTX 550Ti are happening because of improper cooling or cross-ventilation in the room. You see, a gaming system is not like your regular computer where everything is scaled down to work for 24-hrs nonstop. A gaming computer is a high-end machine like expensive cars and gadgets and it requires care to work at its optimum level.

• If you feel like you can’t stop your game or any work that is using your graphics card continuously, then you can open the case of your CPU carefully and let the heat cool off naturally.

• You can make card’s fan run at 100% speed with the help of Nvidia control panel. It is done in case of overclocking but, it will also help you when you play some hefty game.

• As I said that GTX 550 Ti is a cool and low power consuming graphics card (follow the specs and price link), you will not face temperature problems a lot. However, if you do then try out some cooling solutions (even normal fan solutions would do the trick).

• It should be noted that all drivers must be up to date. It does not affect temperature problems a lot but if your card is optimized for best performance (via drivers), it will not lag or stutter when you play games continuously.

This was a little compilation on what happened with my graphics card and it may or may not happen with yours. However, solutions are right there by you, you don’t have to waste your money on anything expensive.