The ATI Radeon HD 4550, one of the junior solutions in the latest lineup, boasts pretty attractive features, it supports DirectX 10.1, advanced second generation Avivo high definition video processor, hardware video streams acceleration, sound over HDMI and consumes very little power. But this is all the promises from the developers. In our turn, we are going to find out if the Radeon HD 4550 is really as good for playing new gaming titles and functioning as part of home theater PC system for playing back Blu-ray movies. The sole purpose of this Radeon HD 4550 is to please those on small budget that want to enjoy some gaming or who are going for a complete quiet multimedia system configuration. - X-Bit Labs

ATI Radeon HD 4550 Multimedia Style Design Review

The year is nearly over, and we can say it quite confidently now that it has been a very lucky year for AMD's graphics department. This year has been crucial for the company. This year though ATI finally recovered from a long crisis with lack of competitive products and changed the market situation in its favor. The release of the RV770 chips proved that ATI was not only capable of rivaling NVIDIA but could create great solutions head above the opponent's. Suffice it to say that the Radeon HD 4850 card with a recommended price of $199 could deliver the same performance as the GeForce 9800 GTX that came much higher priced.

ATI developed two different PCB designs for the new entry level card, a full size and a low profile PCB. The power circuit is simple, consisting of two single phase regulators. And well now the GPU is serviced by the more advanced regulator incorporating two power transistors. The other regulator has only one transistor and is responsible for the memory chips. Both regulators can be reinforced with additional transistors, but it can hardly be necessary as the power consumption of the RV710 is unlikely to exceed even 30W. Perhaps this PCB design was developed with ATI's next generation entry GPU's in mind that need more power.

There are both highs and lows about the Radeon HD 4550 graphics card we have tested today. Priced at $50, it offers a lot of features such as the hardware video decoder that can decode H.264 and VC-1 formats. Our tests showed that the Radeon HD 4550 ensures unrivalled quality when playing Blu-ray and DVD movies but it is somewhat inferior to its opponents when it comes to playing ordinary DVD's. This is a drawback since many users have accumulated huge collections of DVD's and want to enjoy them for many years. On the other hand, the playback quality depends largely on driver optimizations.

Thus, the Radeon HD 4550 should only be installed into a home theater PC if the latter is not going to run modern 3D games. It may be an inexpensive, compact and quiet system with low power consumption. If you want a universal home theater PC, you should take a look at the more advanced products from ATI, like the Radeon HD 4850. Having similar multimedia capabilities, this card is far faster in games and costs less than $150. The Radeon HD 4550 is meant for small and quiet home theater PC's with low gaming or as an alternative to an integrated graphics core if you don't want to use the latter for some reason.