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Review: AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4550 - budget bonanza?

by Tarinder Sandhu on 30 September 2008, 08:51

Tags: ATI Radeon HD 4550 , AMD (NYSE:AMD), ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qapjk

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System setup and notes

Hardware

Graphics cards ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 512MB Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB XFX GeForce 9400 GT 512MB XFX GeForce 9500 GT 256MB
Current pricing, including VAT £30-35* £29 £39 £55 £40 £53
Shader model 4.1 4.0
Stream processors 80 40 120 320 16 32
GPU clock speed (MHz) 600 600 725 750 550 550
Shader clock speed (MHz) 600 600 725 750 1,350 1,400
GFLOPs throughput 96 48 174 480
64.8
134.4
Memory clock speed (MHz) 1,593 1,000 1,600 2,000 1,400 1,600
Memory bus width (Bits) 64 64 128 128 128 128
Memory bandwidth (GB/s) 12.8 8
25.6
32 22.4 25.6
Video-acceleration tech UVD 2.0 UVD UVD
UVD 2.0 PureVideo 2 PureVideo 2
CPU Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16GHz, 1,333MHz FSB, dual-core)
Motherboard Foxconn P45A-S XFX nForce 780i
Motherboard BIOS P05 P01
Mainboard software Intel Inf 9.0.0.1008 NVIDIA device driver 15.17
Memory 4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair DOMINATOR PC8500 
Memory timings and speed 5-5-5-15 2T @ 1066MHz
PSU Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W
Monitor Dell 24in 2405FPW - 1,920x1,200px
Disk drive(s) Seagate 500GB - 32MB cache - SATAII (ST3500320AS)
Graphics driver Radeon HD 4550 press driver Radeon HD 4670 press driver Radeon HD 4670 press driver Radeon HD 4670 press driver ForceWare 178.13 ForceWare 177.79
Operating system Windows Vista Business SP1, 64-bit


* estimated pricing

Software

3D Benchmarks Company Of Heroes: Opposing Fronts v2.301: DX10 - high quality
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5 (demo_00010.dem, map Valley): OpenGL - vhq
Call Of Duty 4
v1.7.568 custom HEX benchmark: DX10 - highest quality

Notes

We're being extremely harsh on these low-end cards by running them using our mid-range settings, encompassing 1,280x1,024 and 1,680x1,050 resolutions with decent image-quality settings.

Race Driver: GRID has been removed this instance because the game simply isn't playable on the vast majority of el-cheapo cards with our settings. The menus load up, but that's about it.

NVIDIA and AMD has been telling us that new GPUs are inordinately faster than the ones they replace at a particular price-point, so we're looking to provide the proof.