When ATI launched the RV770 last summer, few could predict the amount of chaos that was brought onto the market. Even today, the barrage of products and the assault on NVIDIA continues, with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4550. But today, we look at things from a different perspective. The Radeon HD 4800 series handle the gaming side of things very well, but the price point of the Radeon HD 4550 aims toward a very different market. While we still look at the gaming capabilities of this card, the testing will be primarily geared for a home theatre PC and high definition playback applications. So sit back, relax and let us torture yet another video card for you and give our feedback on the benchmarks. - ClubOC

Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB Board Style Review

The way the packaging works with most products is, the more expensive the product, the more extensive the packaging. No exception here, the Radeon HD 4550 comes in a box that is only slightly larger than a typical PC game box. Of course, what kind of box would it be if there wasn't a scantily clad female on the front? The card itself is surprisingly small. We can't even remember owning a smaller video card than this one. The board is so small, that the secondary VGA connection is attached to the PCB via a ribbon cable. The cooling of the core is done by a very quiet 40mm fan, as in fact it doesn't generate much heat.

The backside of the card isn't terribly exciting, as all it has to reveal to us is the other two GDDR3 chips. And speaking of the GDDR3 memory, it appears the memory on this card are provided by Samsung, and marked as 1.1ns and as such are rated for 1800MHz data speed. The contents of the package are what we would expect of a value solution. This card comes clocked at 600MHz core clock with the memory at a conservative 1600MHz effective. It does also come with a highly reduced amount of stream processors, and with that we mean only 80 shaders to work with. It does still offer CrossFire support, but cableless.

Reading the gaming benchmarks might leave one to believe that we are just disappointed in this card, however this could not be further from the truth. Make no bones about it, this card is not a gaming card. However, for home theatre PC applications this card is absolutely perfect. The excellent decoding for both VC-1 and H.264 is very impressive, as well as the relative lack of noise from the fan and the small overall size of the card. Add in the HDMI channel audio capability, and you have the perfect home media solution.