FitMyLLM
▸ NVIDIA· FERMI 2.0

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti

Running LLMs on the GeForce GTX 550 Ti — the long read: which models fit at which quantisation, and the settings worth changing. · Or what a budget buys

VRAM
1 GB
BUDGET
BANDWIDTH
98.5
GB/S
MODELS Q4
4/449
1%
7B Q4 SPEED
~11
USABLE
▸ MODEL COVERAGE @ Q41% OF ALL
▸ ESTIMATED SPEED· BY MODEL SIZE @ Q4

Average speeds at Q4 quantization. Actual performance varies by model architecture and context length.

3B
—
1.7GB NEEDED
7B
—
3.9GB NEEDED
14B
—
7.9GB NEEDED
32B
—
18.0GB NEEDED
70B
—
39.4GB NEEDED
▸ MEASURED RIG REPORTS

We rent the machine and time every model on it: decode, VRAM peak, concurrency, watts and cost per million tokens. Yours may already be one of them — and two are free to read in full.

SEE THE REPORTS →
▸ SPECIFICATIONS
VRAM
1 GB
BANDWIDTH
98.5 GB/s
FP16 COMPUTE
0.7 TFLOPS
TDP
116W
MEMORY
GDDR5
ARCHITECTURE
Fermi 2.0
CUDA CORES
192
PCIE
Gen 2 x16
4
FAST MODELS · >30 TOK/S
Real-time chat speed
4
USABLE · >10 TOK/S
Comfortable for all tasks
4
TOTAL COMPATIBLE
Fit in VRAM at Q4
▸ DON’T WANT TO BUY?

Test GeForce GTX 550 Ti (or anything bigger) without committing. Pay by the second, cancel anytime.

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▸ COMPATIBLE MODELS· 4
S
Falcon-H1R Tiny 90M0.09B
FALCON·256K CTX· CHAT· REASONING
876
TOK/S · 54% VRAM
›
S
SmolLM2 135M0.135B
SMOLLM·2K CTX· CHAT
584
TOK/S · 57% VRAM
›
S
nomic-embed-text-v1.5 100M0.14B
EMBEDDING·8K CTX· CHAT
563
TOK/S · 57% VRAM
›
S
GPT-2 124M0.14B
GPT2·1K CTX· CHAT
563
TOK/S · 57% VRAM
›
▸ NEXT STEP

Get personalized recommendations.

See ranked models with benchmark scores, run commands, and precise speed estimates for your GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

WHAT THIS CARD IS WORTH

GTX 550 Ti holds 4 of the models in our catalogue and is, in practice, a Q4_K_M card — the largest it takes is Qwen 3.5 0.8B at Q4_K_M.

TOKENS/SEC PER $100
—
8B at Q4_K_M, so cards compare like for like
VRAM PER $100
—
what memory costs on this card
THE BIGGEST IT TAKES
Qwen 3.5 0.8B0.87B · Q4_K_M0.9 GB136 tok/sEST
LFM2 700M0.74B · Q4_K_M0.9 GB160 tok/sEST
Falcon-H1R Tiny 0.6B0.6B · Q6_K0.9 GB147 tok/sEST
Falcon Perception 0.6B0.6B · Q5_K_S0.9 GB173 tok/sEST
Falcon-H1 0.5B0.52B · Q6_K0.8 GB170 tok/sEST
Qwen 2.5 0.5B0.5B · Q8_00.9 GB136 tok/sEST
SmolVLM 500M0.5B · Q6_K0.9 GB177 tok/sEST
SmolLM2 360M0.36B · Q8_00.8 GB189 tok/sEST
AGAINST CARDS OF SIMILAR MEMORY
M2 (8GB)5 GB$5992.8 tok/s per $100
M3 (8GB)5 GB$5992.8 tok/s per $100
M1 (8GB)5 GB$4992.2 tok/s per $100
Radeon RX 6600S4 GB$175—
GTX 550 Ti1 GB——

Neighbours in memory rather than in price: memory decides whether a card can do the job at all, so two cards of the same size at different prices is the comparison you are making. Ordered by memory, then bandwidth — not by the value column, which is worked out from bandwidth and price alone and therefore rewards a cheap card whatever its software stack does to that bandwidth in practice. Read it as one input, not as a ranking.

▸ DEVICE UNDER TEST

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti — 1 GB VRAM.

▸ GEFORCE GTX 550 TI SPEC
BRAND
NVIDIA
VRAM
1 GB GDDR5
BANDWIDTH
98.5 GB/s
FP16 COMPUTE
0.7 TFLOPS
FP32 COMPUTE
0.7 TFLOPS
CUDA CORES
192
TDP
116 W
ARCHITECTURE
Fermi 2.0
▸ AI CAPABILITY
4/ 449 models @ Q4

With 1 GB VRAM and 98.5 GB/s bandwidth, this GPU handles models up to 0.14B parameters.

Speed ≈ bandwidth / model_size × efficiency. A 7B model at Q4 runs at ~11 tok/s.

§ 01TOP MODELS FOR GEFORCE GTX 550 TI
4 FIT · SHOWING 4
MODELSIZEVRAM Q4TOK/SAVG
nomic-embed-text-v1.5 100M0.14B0.6 GB56362.3
GPT-2 124M0.14B0.6 GB5636.5
SmolLM2 135M0.135B0.6 GB5847.0
Falcon-H1R Tiny 90M0.09B0.5 GB876—