Sapphire Radeon HD5550 Ultimate is one of AMD’s products that had been released two months ago. By learning the market reaction over this product, it seems that Radeon HD5550 received less salute from AMD’s consumers. Compared to 5450, Radeon HD5550 is not as well-established as 5450. Instead of being placed in the entry level like 5450, Radeon HD5550 is positioned at the lowest rung so you may even predict what less in this processor.

Specifically, AMD has made significant changes over HD5550 that is by disabling a fifth of the shader processors included on the GPU. It means that HD5550 comes with 320 active instead of 400 of the Radeon 5670. HD5550 also has lower number of texture units which is only 16 from 20. Moreover, AMD designs this processor with a GPU clock of 550 MHz and a memory clock of only 800 MHz that comes along with 1GB of DDR2.

Furthermore, apart from its 128-bit interface, HD5550 doesn’t seem to have enough bandwidth because it only delivers 1/5th of the total GDDR5 included in 5670 able to give. Moreover, in spite of a significant reduction in specification AMD made to this processor, HD5550 offers the nearly identical price to the 5670 model.

This identical price is tagged by learning the great addition included into HD5550 which is a 100% passive cooler. It is admitted that with the capacity it features, this processor is one of well-specified cards available on the market. Also, the adequate shader grunt comes with it enables AVIVO and Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing to work at the same time.

This ability is just the same one the nirvana of Blu-ray audio standard, bitstreamed Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio able to perform. As well, you can use HDMI 1.3a port that is designed to be compatible with Denon receiver.

In addition, when you examine the Radeon HD5550 by applying it to play most wanted PC games, for example the Crysis Warhead, this processor is unfortunately not giving the best shot especially when you use it at 1280 x 1024 of resolution. It means that you will only be able to manage a paltry of 13fps on Core i7, whereas the 5670 is able to manage the performance at 31fps and 5450 downs to 8fps.

Well, you may take another option which is by reducing the settings to “performance” mode to have smoother experience, but the final result will be far from what you have expected because it is pretty disappointing.

Another fallback this Radeon HD5550 offers is the heat it gives off. From the low specifications it packs, the heat is extremely too much and it is even making the heat sink to be overly hot as the GPU shows the temperature level of more than 80 degrees. Surely, you will need extra fan to cool it down or add another slim-line HTPC fan box so the processor will work more comfortably.

Finally, after getting the valuable knowledge about Sapphire Radeon HD5550 Ultimate, you can see now the all specifications it brings as well as the capabilities it performs. It is positive that even though it belongs to the lowest grade card, HD5550 is able to perform ATi’s full suite of video-enhancing technologies at the same time. However, you should really consider about the insufficient fan cooler that is proved to bring uncomfortable heat since the 5670 seems to have better specification regarding the fan cooler availability. Indeed, the choice is always yours.

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