The AMD graphic core codenamed 'Redwood' offers a diverse set of products in the HD 5000 (code name Evergreen) range, with two distinct performance levels - HD 5600 and HD 5500. Today Rage3D looks at Sapphire's HD 5550 Ultimate card, a completely silent variant.

The HD 5550 Ultimate is physically larger than its closest relative, the HD 5570, looking more akin to the next level up HD 5670. Where the HD 5570 offers a low profile option with replacement backplane header and detachable VGA output, the HD 5550 is a diminutive in length but remains a full height card - plus some. The PCB itself is not identical to the HD 5670, at least our sample isn't, but could easily be mistaken for it.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5550 Ultimate

Product Highlights

• $90USD estimated MSRP

• 550MHz 40nm Redwood core

• 627m Transistors

• 4 SIMD / 320 STREAM processors

• 16 Texture Units / 8 Render Back-Ends (ROPs)

• 128-bit 1GB DDR2 Memory @ 400MHz (800MHz effective)

• 10W idle power

• HDMI 1.3b, DVI dual-link and VGA outputs

• Integrated 7.1 HD Audio with Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio bitstreaming (true Blu-ray protected audio path) Support

• Quad Buffer support for Third Party Stereoscopic 3D gaming & movie playback

Read on to see how the Sapphire Radeon HD 5550 Ultimate 1GB performs as a full high definition media card and a 'half' HD gaming card, compared against AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5570.