Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB

System Setup:

For testing out this ATI graphics card we used the same system from our other recent graphics card reviews. This system was made up of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor running at 4.00GHz, an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional X48 motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, Western Digital 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, and an OCZ EliteXStream 800W power supply. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 performance was compared to the Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB and Radeon HD 4670 512MB. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was the Linux distribution being used with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, X Server 1.4.1 pre-release, and Catalyst 8.9.

With the Catalyst 8.8 driver having introduced OverDrive On Linux we did overclock this Radeon HD 4550 graphics card. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 is clocked at 600/800MHz by default while the highest OverDrive states are a 50MHz boost on both the GPU and memory. We had no problems reaching this maximum overclock of 650/850MHz and still hadn't run into any cooling issues.

To benchmark this graphics card we used the Phoronix Test Suite with the Nexuiz, Doom 3, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, X-Plane 9, Unigine Sanctuary, Unigine Tropics, and GtkPerf tests. On the following pages are our Linux results for the Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 and comparison graphics cards.