Point of View offers GeForce GTX 550 Ti Videocard with 4GB Memory

Point of View is offering up a new PC videocard based on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti chipset. While in general it is pretty much the same as most other 550 Ti-based cards on the market, this one primarily differs in the amount of graphics memory it has onboard. Yes folks, you get a whopping four gigabytes of video memory on this card. Given the fact that Nvidia's GeForce 550 Ti reference boards had one quarter of that amount, Point of View's choice here seems kind of crazy!

The GeForce 550 Ti is not really a high-end GPU either – higher-end mainstream at best – and the 4GB of memory is of the slower DDR3 type instead of the more optimal GDDR5. Madness you say? Well, apparently, madness with a method.

While the extra memory may not be very useful for games, one must also factor in the increasing prevalence of GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit)-supported applications and code – programming that makes use of the videocard for computing, not just the CPU. Perhaps the extra RAM will be useful to programmers and those running really heavy computing apps.

But of course, there is still the very common state of mind out there that “bigger number = faster”. I suspect that a lot of people will buy these Point of View cards only because of this. While they are not available in North America yet, in Europe they are available for €113 each. (Via The Tech Report) (Images are of the normal 1GB version of the card, but the 4GB should look very similar.)