PowerColor HD 4550 Review
Submitted By Steven on Apr 8 2009 at 12:23 PM
Introduction
The HD 4550 and the HD 4350, represent ATI's current crop of value-oriented, low-range video cards. Performance wise, the HD 4550 lands somewhere between the typical on-board Integrated Graphics Controllers and midrange graphics cards. This placement makes ATI's offerings an oddity in today's market. The performance niche filled by cards like the HD 4350 and HD 4550 is being rendered null because of the ever-evolving nature of Integrated Graphics Controllers and the increasing accessibility of high performance video cards. Thus the market for these types of cards is rapidly shrinking with every generation. So what exactly can the HD 4550 offer?
| Feature | HD 3300 IGP | HD 4350 | HD 4550 | HD 4650 | HD 4670 |
| Shader Units | 40 | 40 | 80 | 320 | 320 |
| ROPs | 4 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 8 |
| TMUs | 4 | 8 | 8 | 32 | 32 |
| Core | RS780D | RV710 | RV710 | RV730 | RV730 |
| Transistors | 181 million | 242 million | 242 million | 514 million | 514 million |
| Memory Size | 128 MB |
256 or 512 MB |
512 MB |
256 or 512 MB |
512 or 1024 MB |
| Memory Bus Width | 16-bit | 64-bit | 64-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth | 2.6 GB | 8 GB | 12.8 GB | 21.3 GB | 32 GB |
| Core Clock | 700 MHz | 600 MHz | 600 MHz | 600 MHz | 750 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1333 MHz | 500 MHz | 800 MHz | 667 MHz | 1 GHz |
| MSRP | IGP | $35-$40 | $45-$50 | $55-$70 | $80-$10 |
Inside the HD 4550 is the RV710 GPU, a slimmed down version of the marvelous RV770 featured in many of ATI's performance graphics cards (such as the HD 4830 and HD 4850). The RV710 is based on TSMC's 55nm manufacturing technology and features 242 million transistors. This little chip holds a total of 80 shader processors, 4 ROPs, and 8 TMUs. The RV710 has a reference clock speed of 600 MHz, and is paired with 512mb of DDR3 memory - clocked at 800 MHz and linked to a 64-bit memory bus.
The subject of this review is the PowerColor HD 4550 (model: AX4550 512MK3), which has had its memory clocked at a slightly higher rate than ATI's reference specification. The AX4550 512MK3 clock speeds are set at 600 MHz core and 900 MHz for the memory. This slight boost in memory speeds grants the PowerColor HD 4550 a full 14.4 GB of memory bandwidth, as opposed to 12.8 GB offered by the reference models.
