Introduction

When it comes to GPUs, everyone always looks to the top end cards to judge the current performance available on the market. Really though, the majority of money is made in the mid and budget range cards as that's what everyone can afford. The main problem with these though, is often the performance doesn't allow the prospective gamer much head room for what games will be playable. Today we have the 4550 card from Sapphire which with 512MB, which we're hoping will give reasonable gaming ability. Let's find out.

NB. Our card has a different cooler from the one in the picture above, taken from the Sapphire website.

Features

• ATI Radeon™ HD 4550 – 512MB of DDR3 memory
  
• DirectX® 10.1
  
• 80 stream processing units
  
• 12x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
  
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
  
• Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ technology multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
  
• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology
  
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray™ and HD Video
  
• DVD Upscaling & Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support & Integrated DisplayPort with audio
  
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology

Specifications

• I/O Output: VGA+DL-DVI-I+HDTV
  
• Core Clock: 600 MHz & 80 Stream Processors
  
• Memory Clock: 800MHz, 1800 Mbps.
  
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
  
• 512MB /64bit DDR3 memory interface
  
• Single Slot Active Cooler
  
• HDMI compliant via dongle
  
• 7.1 Audio Channel Support
  
• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
  
• Shader Model 4.1 support