PowerColor Radeon 5550 512MB DDR3

[Skyguy]

The PowerColor Radeon 5550 is a very small, low-power budget graphics card, marketed in the $70 range to consumers who are primarily interested in home media and HTPC usage. The card is certainly more capable than the entry-level 5450 in terms of horsepower, but the price tag on the 5550 isn't far off from the PowerColor 5670, a budget gaming card that impressed us with its excellent balance of performance and value.



Click HERE for the full review.

[smduff]

Good review Jake looks like a great little card for 70 bones

[KIPPER]

yes, a nice card for the money.

[Doctor_Death]

Good review! For $70 youn can't beat it if your looking for a good HTPC GPU

[linux11]

hello to all,

Thanks for the informative review on the HD 5550. I read with much interest, and would like to ask some input from forum members.

I recently bought a PowerColor HD 5570 512MB DDR3 ( link http://www.powercolor.com/us/product...res.asp?id=229 ). The card is very identical in design to the HD 5550 that was reviewed here. (The DDR3 chips is the same hynix chip as well)
The specifications for the card is ATi Redwood, 400 shaders, stock speed 650/800 MHz.

I tested my card with FurMark 1.8.2 and it passed at stock speed, maxing out at 64C with automatic fan speed. The card can run FurMark stability test at 700/800 setting 68C. However, this card would fail (black screen then power save) at stock speed (both auto fan or manual 70%) when running Unigine Heaven benchmark (all DX9/10/11) at low settings. I monitor the temperature with GPU-Z and the temperature before the black screen is always 60C. I down clock the card to 600/800 and it pass the benchmark maxing at 57C.

So I am puzzled by this and would like to seek some input, as to why the failure, and fundamentally, what is the main difference between the FurMark stability test and the Unigine Heaven benchmark.

I am fine running the card at 600/800 at 0.9V, Manual 20% fan for quiet daily operations. Radeon BIOS Editor (RBE) works on this card as well for powerplay settings, but i didn't get to set fan speed.

Thanks.

[smduff]

Turn off tessellation in the Unigine Heaven benchmark

[linux11]

hello smduff,

thanks for your reply. Getting Unigine Heaven 2.1 now (Was using Unigine Heaven 2.0 ) and will try tessellation off for the benchmarks.

However, does tessellation setting comes into play when running DX9 and DX10 benchmarks? I notice that it's shaded out when I chose DX9/10 (can't choose between disable, moderate, normal or extreme).

Thanks.

[linux11]

hi all,

Tested with Unigine Heaven 2.1, DX9 still crashes, while DX11 is ok.

Anyway, i hope i did not go off-topic. Back to the review, the HD 5550 is a nice card to run a HTPC or media pc. The ATi video converter works, if you install the correct encoder. I converted a 700MB avi to PSP mp4 in around 22 minutes. It is quite impressive although the end quality is sub-par, and the file can't play in my PSP (still investigating).