AMD planned the launch of the Radeon HD 4550 graphics card many months ago, but oddly enough this entry level graphics card comes to light ony now. It almost seems right that in a time where financial stability is uncertain that AMD would launch a graphics card in the $45-55 price range as they have been bringing out video cards that are price versus performance winners since the Radeon HD 3800 series launched last November. And a year later AMD is still headed in the same direction and with price versus performance they are today announcing the Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4350 graphics cards. These two cards share GPU architecture that was first seen in the Radeon HD 4800 series, but with nearly everything reduced to lower the price tag. - Legit Reviews

ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB Graphics Version Review

The ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card is rather small in length and while it is a full height card it shouldn't have any issues fitting in nearly all of the cases on the market today. The very first thing that one notices with this graphics card is the lack of a heatsink and that is because this card only uses 20-25W and doesn't need a fan to keep it cooling. Under the heat spreader is a graphics core that has just 80 stream processors. This is far fewer than the 320 stream processors that can be found on a Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. It doesn't offer any CrossFire interconnects, but that doesn't mean it can't run CrossFire in the contrary.

And it simply doesn't need any interconnects to enable CrossFire or Hybrid CrossFire. This means you'll still be able pair a couple of these together in order to boost gaming performance. With a core clock of 600MHz and a memory clock of 1600MHz you might just need the boost for some game titles. The back of the Radeon HD 4550 isn't too interesting, but you can clearly see two of the four Samsung GDDR3 memory chips and that the heatsink used to cool the graphics card actually comes through this side as well. The entire passive heatsink is contacting just the GPU core, which might shock many.

The ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card is aimed at the entry level graphics card market, which means those wanting to spend less than $50 or less on a graphics card. For that price range the Radeon HD 4550 faces tough competition as for roughly the past week the GeForce 9600 GSO could be had for $36 after a coupon and rebate over at Newegg. The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO killed the ATI Radeon HD 4550 in the games, so for those looking for the best price versus performance card that is hard to ignore. The GeForce 9500 GT is another card that was ahead in nearly all of the benchmarks and it can be found for $43.

With both the GeForce 9500 GT and GeForce 9600 GSO in the $36-50 price range the Radeon HD 4550 has a tough road ahead if it wants to move off store shelves. The strong points of the Radeon HD 4550 are the obvious ones. It's a passive card and that means it has no moving parts to break and produces no noise. The fact that it is silent and consumes little power means that it should be ideal for home theatre PC's. The AMD Radeon HD 4550 has a great feature set, but NVIDIA already has faster performing cards that cost less on the market already with the likes of the GeForce 9500 GT and GeForce 9600 GSO cards.