These past two months have been pretty exciting for us in the graphics card department. In late August, we checked out the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, ATI's top of the line card. Since then, we've looked at two factory overclocked Radeon HD 4850's, a factory overclocked Radeon HD 4870, a Radeon HD 4670 and last a factory overclocked Radeon HD 4650 card. That covers the entire Radeon line excepting three cards, the brand new midrange card, the Radeon HD 4830 and a couple of very low budget cards, like the Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4350, the latter isn't released yet. Our friends at Sapphire have added an additional selection, with the new Radeon HD 4550. - ThinkComputers

Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB Low Profile Review

The Radeon HD 4670 and also the Radeon HD 4650 are sub-$100 cards, called mainstream cards in the video card industry. And a big market share of all video cards bought yearly are in this class. In the past, these video cards limited the user to lower end games, they generally wouldn't play higher performance games like Crysis at all. These two cards will play those games, though of course at lower settings. This Radeon HD 4550 card has a very small footprint, and comes with both a standard expansion bracket and a low profile bracket, sports 512MB of GDDR3 memory, and has active cooling to boot at a low pice.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 comes in a box about the size of a game. This box is very attractive covered with graphics, specifications, features and awards awarded Sapphire by several websites and publications. The card itself is in a cardboard compartment and in a static-free sleeve. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 is a tiny little video card that will fit in any desktop PC with a PCI Express interface. The GPU is a smaller version of its bigger brothers, the Radeon HD 4800 series and the Radeon HD 4600 series. There are 80 stream processors, an incredible number for such a low-end GPU and has active cooling.

Also pretty incredible, these Radeon HD 4550 boards sports 512MB of memory, in four 128MB strong Samsung GDDR3 chips. We don't know that you will find 512MB of memory in any other video card in this class. As we mentioned earlier, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 is considered a low profile video card. The card is configured so that with a normal expansion bracket you get a DVI connector, a video connector and an analog display connector. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 includes a nice bundle considering the card's price. We spent a couple of hours playing games with the Radeon HD 4550 graphics card.

Though keep in mind, this is not a gaming card, it costs about half of some of the lower end gaming cards. Most cards in this class won't play these games at all, so you'd have to consider the minimal gaming capabilities a plus rather than beating the card up for the low frame rates. This card is intended to give excellent performance for the average computer user, with the benefit of Blu-ray decoding, high definition audio via HDMI and 1080p resolution, making it an excellent choice. The low profile option means that it will fit in virtually any computer case and you won't find another with 512MB of GDDR3 memory easily.

The fan was silent, which was a little surprising. We have to give special mention to the card's bundle. Since the included low profile bracket has to be purchased separately for most video cards, and they run about $8. Many low-end cards still don't include an HDMI adapter. If needed, these two items add much value to this already inexpensive video card. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 runs $60 at my favorite online retailer. For placement in a micro ATX slim case, an upgrade of integrated graphics on a non-gaming rig or a card for a home theatre PC, we find this a definite value with a lot going for it.