Full Review

If you are looking for decent performance from the ATI Radeon HD4550 then you will have to look elsewhere. But if what you need is a very inexpensive dedicated graphics solution for your PC, then the HD4550 might just be the pick of the litter.

Specs & Design

The HD4550 comes with 512MB of RAM, a 600MHz core, 80 shaders and uses a 64-bit memory interface. The HD4550 we reviewed was a reference model from ATI and had a DVI port, an HDMI port and a Display port; however the ports will differ according to manufacturers. The HD4550 utilizes a completely passive cooling system and as a result sports a large heatsink and no fan. As a result, it makes absolutely no noise when in operation but the temperatures are also higher than the ones we noted on other budget cards. Similar to other cards below the 5K price range, the HD 4550 also doesn’t require an additional power input.

The HD4550 utilizes a completely passive cooling system and as a result sports a large heatsink and no fan.

Performance

We tested the card on a system made up of an Intel Core i7 870 processor clocked at 2.93MHz, 2GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 RAM, an Intel DP55KG Extreme Motherboard, an Intel X25-M 80GB SSD and running Windows 7 64-bit. Our benchmarks consisted of the 3D Mark ’06 and 3D Mark Vantage suite of tests and temperature and audio level tests. For gaming we tested the card using Crysis, Far Cry 2 and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. at 1280x1024 and 1024x768 resolutions.

The HD4550’s performance scores were quite pitiable and the least impressive we had seen from a graphics card. It averaged near single digit fps in almost all of our gaming tests and even the synthetic test results were poor.

Bottom Line

The ATI Radeon HD4550 is priced at Rs. 2,700 and at that light a price-tag, its performance looks justified. Do keep in mind that the card isn’t designed for playing even relatively new games, but rather to provide a decent graphics option at a thoroughly inexpensive price.