While we don't doubt for a second that everyone would really love to somehow find themselves surrounded by the most high-end computer products, the reality is that sometimes it's simply too expensive or there's the plain old fact that you don't need it. The low to mid-range market has been heating up over the past few months, NVIDIA released the GeForce 9500 GT which we personally felt was a massive disappointment due to the price to performance ratio when compared to the GeForce 9600 GSO. ATI hasn't been asleep though. The Radeon HD 4670 came out and has really managed to impress. And now adding to the Radeon HD 4000 series however, is a new low-end entry level model. - TweakTown

Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB Video Card Review

As you would expect, Sapphire has opted for a much smaller box to help keep the cost of freight down on the new budget aimed Radeon HD 4550. Across the top of the box we have the Sapphire logo and below that their motto, mention of the series and the fact the card comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. In the middle of the box we have a picture and below that we have the model mentioned again, in this case the Radeon HD 4550. Moving down a little more we have some features of the card and right across the bottom we have a number of logos that relate to the card and at the back the many awards already received.

Moving onto the card, as you would expect there isn't a whole lot going on. As the low profile bracket may have indicated, the card is of course low profile. The core is cooled by a blue fan that resembles an old Orb cooler from Thermaltake. As far as extra little connectors go, there isn't really anything going on. There's no extra power needed for the card, nor are CrossFire connectors present. The only plugs we have are one for the fan and the other for the analog port. In the event you want to use the low profile bracket, you do lose the analog output, but with the included DVI connector you can still make use of the connectivity.

Looking at the specs department, it's nothing to get excited about. We found ourselves with 80 stream processors. The core clock comes in at 600MHz while the 512MB of GDDR3 comes in at 1600MHz effective utilizing a 64-bit memory bus. While the model will be available in both 256MB and 512MB form, the particular one we have here today supports the latter. While the card is yet to appear on our local shores, local pricing in the states puts the card at around the $60 mark. How's that compare against the GeForce 9500 GT which for the most part performs at twice the speed and does a lot better at games?

Not great, since an extra fifty percent is going to literally yield you double the performance. And considering our thoughts on the GeForce 9500 GT, it doesn't look good for the Radeon HD 4550. This is where it becomes hazy though, is there anyone out there who's really going to buy a Radeon HD 4550 for gaming? Well we hope not, because the chances are you are going to be severely disappointed, which means that the card isn't exactly aimed for that particular market. The performance isn't the only give away though, the inclusion of the low profile bracket caters for a cliental that doesn't game.

The thing is, most products are great. But when you look at them from the right perspective, it's easy to say that the Radeon HD 4550 is an absolutely hopeless card from a gaming standpoint. If you're looking for a new graphics card to put in your new home theatre PC, the Radeon HD 4550 from Sapphire is great. If you're looking for a new low profile graphics card to put in your new home theatre PC, then the card is the best we've seen from the current generation of cards from NVIDIA and AMD. Performance isn't purely rated on just how many frames per second a graphics card can push out in a game as there is more to it.

It's targeted at home theatre PC users and the mean package, low profile nature and cheap price make it an absolute excellent performer. If you're looking for a graphics card that is cheap and is going to suit your home theatre PC, this is one that's going to be hard to pass up on. If you want to do a bit of gaming, can increase the budget and have a full height card we would recommend spending the extra money on the Radeon HD 4670 which makes not only a great home theatre PC card, but also a nice little mid-range gaming one.