HIS Radeon HD 5550 1GB GDDR3 Review
Testbed & Temperatures
Published: 6th July 2010 | Source: HIS | Price: ~£65 Est. |
Testbed
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
Gigabyte MA770T UD3P Motherboard
4GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3-1600 C7 AM3
Samsung Spinpoint F1 320GB SATA II Hard Disk Drive
HIS Radeon HD 5550 1GB GDDR3 Graphics Card
XFX Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW SATA
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Catalyst 10.6 64bit Drivers
For a fair test, we will be comparing the Radeon HD 5550 graphics card against it's bigger brother; the Radeon HD 5670. While they are both based on the same graphics core, the HD 5670 has all 400 stream processors enabled (80 more), features a faster core and GDDR5 memory.
Both graphics cards are being tested with the latest 10.6 drivers from the AMD website on a single testbed.
Temperatures
It came to no surprise that when placed on an open case testbed with limited airflow, the passive cooling solution didn't work particularly well. Over the course of 25 minutes, the temperature increases had shown no sign of plateauing. Once the temperatures pushed over 95c, we decided that enough was enough where we proceeded to cancel the test.
Luckily for the purpose of accurate (and more relevant) temperature testing, we then placed the card in an Antec Fusion HTPC mATX Chassis, where the graphics card reached a maximum temperature of 82c within 10 minutes.
As always with most passively cooled products, a degree of airflow in the environment that surrounds it is required for it to function properly.
Most Recent Comments
Sorry, been waiting ages to drop that one
EDIT. Reason is most onboard tripe has a HDMI out now and that usually means BR playback is a given. A friend of mine got a card similar to this recently (4 series) for about £35. He said it was fine with BR.
Haha ! I ran Batman and benched it with just my 280.. Then I enabled the 8400 and set it to do Physx. I scored about 10 times lower
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Originally Posted by name='AMDFTW'
would this playback full bluray 24p flawless
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Originally Posted by name='alexhull24'
My Radeon 4350 that cost £20 will do that, though it struggles in any 3D really, as expected. I'm struggling to see really what benefits such an expensive HTPC card (at £65 in comparison) would have over my cheap-ass one for pure HTPC uses. The 5xxx series has slightly improved audio over HDMI if I remember correctly, but not a lot to add. The extra power would be wasted in my setup.
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For pure media playback purposes, no the HD 5550's extra grunt will not be noticeable over the HD 5450 or infact it's predecessors. However, this is a product that offers a level of gaming ability at the same time and let's not forget the growing number of GPU Accelerated applications for media encoding.
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