ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 09/29/2008 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

2 - Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Radeon HD 4550 512MB

Right then, all hail AMDs new budget VGA card. We today will test the Radeon HD 4550, it's actually the most expensive 512MB model at 55 USD [insert giggle here].

Our card is equipped with 512MB 128-bit DDR3 memory, yet a 256Mb GDDR2 version will be available as well. The product is a 55nm fabbed part, has DX10.1 compatibility (though with 80 Shader processors not very much recommended ;)

The Radeon HD 4550 is obviously aimed at the lowest of low budget market. It's in fact competing with mainboard integrated chipsets. And looking at it from that point of view, doing very well. So if you need a dirt cheap graphics card that provides dual-link connectivity (1x dual link, 1x single link) and need to decode a DVD or a Blu-Ray movie over the GPU as your processor is specced too low or something .. look no further. This card will do that for you. And even if you are stuck at say 1024x768, you can even play a game perfectly fine, though preferably older titles.

	ATI Radeon HD 4850	ATI Radeon HD 4870	ATI Radeon HD 4670	ATI Radeon HD 4550
# of transistors	965 million	965 million	514million	242 million
Stream Processing Units	800	800	320	80
Clock speed	625 MHz	750 MHz	750 MHz	600 MHz
Memory Clock	2000 MHz GDDR3 (effective)	3600 MHz GDDR5 (effective)	2.0 GHz GDDR3 (effective)	800 MHz GDDR3 (effective)
Math processing rate (Multiply Add)	1000 GigaFLOPS	1200 GigaFLOPS	480 GigaFLOPS	NDA
Texture Units	40	40	32	8
Render back-ends	16	16	16	NDA
Memory	512MB GDDR3	512MB GDDR5	512MB GDDR3	512MB GDDR3
Memory interface	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit	64-bit
Fabrication process	55nm	55nm	55nm	55nm
Power Consumption (peak)	~110W	~160W	~59W	~25W

Fifty bucks or not, it even has the integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz PCM stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution over HDMI. So you see value is what it's all about.

Another interesting fact about the ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card is that it consumes less than 25 (20W actually) watts under full load, making it the ideal choice for implementation across a large diverse install base of desktop PCs.

Product Specifications	ATI Radeon HD 4550
Stream Processing Units	80
Compute Power	96 gigaFLOPS
Microsoft® DirectX® Support	Versions 9, 10 & 10.1
Engine Clock	600 MHz
Memory Clock	800 MHz
Frame Buffer Size	512 MB / 256 MB
Memory Type	DDR3
Memory Data Rate	1.6Gbps
Memory Bandwidth (maximum)	12.8 GB/sec
Anti-Aliasing (AA) (maximum)	24x CFAA
Graphics Bus Technology	PCI Express® 2.0
# of Slots (width)	Single
Power Connectors	None
Maximum Board Power	20 Watts

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