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Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB
Introduction
Sometimes a video card needs to be just that. A card for video. Many high-end workstation motherboards don’t have integrated video, but what good is a computer without a display? The Intel i7 is just the perfect example. A lot of people have the need for quad cores of number-crunching power, but they’re not gamers (we’ll convert you yet, we’ll start slow, like with a relaxing, if hypnotic game of 99 Bricks, followed by a little retro-tastic Gravity Hook. Toss in a few hours of Desktop Tower Defense, and you’re inches away from being neck-deep in Assassin’s Creed) and, appropriately, have no desire to own a beautiful set of GTX 50 millions. (But you’ll get there, we’ll see to that.) And the Radeon HD 4550 is a perfect example of such a video card. It’s on par with really, really good integrated graphics, and Sapphire’s is half-height (and includes a half-height bracket for the SFF-bound) quiet enough, and consumes about zero watts of power. If that’s your speed, there’s almost nothing you could ever find wrong with an HD 4550. Everyone else, though, move along, nothing to see here.  Like any well-behaved stick of Sapphire hardware, this card has a blue PCB. Unlike damn near any other card on the market, the heatsink is a tiny aluminum disk with brief fins and a fan right in the center. I haven’t seen a fan like this in years, it takes me back. In fact I wonder why this card is actively cooled at all, I’d think a chunky bit of aluminum would be cheaper than a dinky bit and a fan, but then, I don’t make ‘em, I just bench ‘em. Sapphire does, at least, offer a passively-cooled model of this video card. This short card barely reaches the end of the PCI-Express slot, and is half-height, which means that all you need to do to make it fit in a short case is to swap out the expansion slot bracket for a short one. Good thing there’s one in the box, along with a driver disk, some paperwork, some instructions, a video-out adapter, a VGA adapter, and love.
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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