ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB review -
1 - A tiny introduction
ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB
Can I take you guys back one year in time ? August 15th 2007. I posted a review on the Radeon HD 2600 XT back then. That product sold for roughly 140 USD. It was a mid-range product under codename RV630 with 120 Shader cores clocked at roughly 800 MHz. Again, that's one year ago ... that was considered mid-range. Six months later we saw a a die-shrink with the Radeon series 3600 which we can categorize at the same level.
Now go back to present time, today we look at the Radeon HD 4550. It's among the cheapest desktop graphics product that ATI can deliver at your doorsteps. This Radeon HD 4550 (GPU codename RV710XT) comes with an optional 256 MB GDDR2 or optional 512MB GDDR3 and will cost you .. 45 to 55 USD respectively.
And that's a manufacturer suggested retail price. So you can drop the most expensive model to 39 to 49 USD in e-tail for sure. Now why the weird little flashback introduction ? This dirt cheap graphics card still packs 80 Shader cores to compute, post-process and render games. And yes, it comes with the same 256MB/512MB DDR3 64-bit memory. So definitely, it's slower, but massively cheaper yet carries all the new features those products had.
Make no mistake, of course this is not a gaming card at all, by far ! Yet this is a GPU harboring pretty a decent clock speed allowing HDCP protected Blu-Ray decoding and optimization over the UVD2 video decoder engine, dual monitor output and yes at 1024x768 or 1280x1024, and sure perhaps you can still play some games as well.
At 45-55 USD, I think that's worthy some of our time to check it out.
Today we have another bang for buck product, a product that I like very much. As what ATI is doing today is pretty remarkable. They are releasing the Radeon HD 4770, a mainstream product at a budget price. Trust me when I say that after reading this review, you will be impressed.
ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB review
Today we test the Radeon HD 4550. It's the cheapest desktop graphics product that ATI can deliver at your doorsteps. This Radeon HD 4550 (GPU codename RV710XT) comes with an optional 256 MB GDDR2 or optional 512MB GDDR3 and will cost you .. 45 to 55 USD respectively.
AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB review
Today a test and review on the new AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB. Obviously ATI is releasing a 1GB model to compete with the new Core 216 version of that GeForce GTX 260. The 4870 series really diggs that GDDR5 memory bandwidth, and what's the cheapest thing to do to gain some extra performance ? Increase the framebuffer volume. Now that by itself is not going to work miracles, yet in memory limited situations (loads of high quality textures, filtering and AA modes) it will help you here and there. And a little bit of extra bite is all the product needs to get beat that Core 216 card again.
ATI Radeon HD 4670 review
We test the ATI Radeon HD 4670. A nice little card that packs some decent punch in the value minded consumers.