Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 review

Graphics giant ATI has been steadily releasing new cards since the summer.

First it was the turn of the high-end units, the Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850, which startled testers, and previously dominant rival nVidia, with their mix of impressive performance and low prices.

Now it's the turn of the cheaper parts. The HD 4550 packs less of a punch on paper than its bigger brothers: the core clock - the part of the chip that controls everything else - now runs at 600MHz, and 512MB of basic DDR3 RAM is included, rather than the dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory that most other modern cards employ.

This made it predictable that our gaming tests would show the HD 4550 to be a merely midrange performer. We had to turn Crysis, a notoriously demanding 3D action game, down to a resolution of 800x600 and medium quality settings to get it running at a smooth frame rate. However, it's still faster than older cards that cost about the same, so rather than being a disappointment this actually means you get at least usable 3D performance from a very low-cost component.

And the new Radeon is even better suited to other entertainment tasks, such as HD movie playback. Installing it shouldn't be a problem: it fits into a commonplace PCI Express 16x slot, and it's a tiny card that won't take up too much room in even the smallest of PC cases. Its small fan is quiet, too, so your movies won't be disturbed.

The HD 4550 has several other media friendly features. It uses the same decoding system as more expensive ATI cards, so it can plough through high definition video with little fuss. Again, it's significantly faster than older cards in this price bracket, such as the nVidia GeForce 8400 GS. Power consumption is low, and there's a DVI-I to HDMI adapter in the box to connect an HDTV set rather than a PC monitor. With the HDCP copy protection system supported, you could add this card with a Blu-ray drive to upgrade an existing PC.

It may not challenge serious gaming cards, but the HD 4550 will have no trouble with HD video. Add the sensible features, and it's an ideal component for a PC media centre at a great price.

Author: Mike Jennings