AMD planned the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card many months ago, but oddly enough this entry level graphics card comes to light amid the worst point drop the DOW has seen to date. It almost seems right that in a time where financial stability is uncertain that AMD would launch a graphics card in the $45-$55 price range as they have been bringing out video cards that are price versus performance winners since the Radeon HD 3800 series launched last November.
The ATI Radeon HD 4550 (RV710) graphics card pictured above measures in at just 6.625" in length and while it is a full height card it shouldn't have any issues fitting in nearly all of the cases on the market today. The very first thing that one notices with this graphics card is the lack of a heat sink and that is because this card only uses 20-25W and doesn't need a fan to keep it cooling. Under the heat spreader is a graphics core that has just 80 stream processors. This is far fewer than the 320 stream processors that can be found on a Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. Even with 80 stream processors the Radeon HD 4550 offers 96 GFLOPS of compute power, which isn't bad considering the MSRP on these cards will be between $45-$55!
Interesting card. Is displayport (in today's configurations) capable of xvYCC/Deep Color? If so it might be beneficial to me to get a displayport->HDMI adapter since (almost?) all DVI and HDMI connectors on video cards are uncapable of such technology.
DisplayPort is seen as a replacement for DVI as future HD applications should be using resolutions up to 4096x2160 and will need capacity far beyond what DVI can deliver. As for deep cooler I don't think DisplayPort has lipsync, xvYCC, or Dolby TrueHD.
I know that the xvYCC color space is in the HDMI 1.3 spec though and all the newer specs like 1.3a, 1.3b and 1.3b1 include deep color support. HDMI has more features than DisplayPort... Think you have the two mixed up.
Ok, so what's the number of colors/color-bits available in DisplayPort? DVI and current implementations of HDMI on GFX cards (1.1 right?) are all 24-bit?
HDMI 1.3 - supports Deep Color with 30-bit, 36-bit, and 48-bit xvYCC, sRGB, or YCbCr compared to 24-bit sRGB or YCbCr in previous HDMI versions
DisplayPort 1.1 - Supports color depth of 6, 8, 10, 12 and 16 bits per component.
DVI - supports 24-bits per pixel (single and dual link) or 48 (dual link only)
I'm still working on it right now actually... I just un-installed the drivers and am re-installing them and to be honest I don't think I fried the card. Now that I have had some time to dedicate to looking into this as it looks like something with the drivers went fubar. Strange... The card is fine without the ATI drivers, but once they are installed I get what is in the screenshot below till the system does a BSOD and reboots... Guess I did fry it... Died before the heat sink could even come off!
It really depends. I had a HD4850 that I know I killed one of the 8 memory chips and it caused the screen to scroll randomly, looked like the green and black letters in The Matrix. I've also had a HD3850 that I severely damaged the core and caused random patches of the screen to go corrupt. What Nate is seeing though looks a lot like memory although if installing the drivers causes this then perhaps it's the Windows install. Either way it's not normal, give those budget cards some pain
yay overclocking =)
