ATI continues to pump out new graphics cards based on the 4000 series. It was only a little over a week ago that the 4670 was revealed and today we have a new card to look at, AMD's Radeon HD 4550. This one is targeting a market quite a bit under even the $79 MSRP of the Radeon 4670. Looks take a look at AMD's latest budget card and see how it stacks up.

As with all other 4000 series cards the previous features are maintained: DirectX 10.1 support, UDV2 for H.264 decoding. 7.1 sound over HDMI, second generation 55nm process, AMD's AVIVO technology, PCI-Express 2.0, CrossfireX technology, easy DVI-to-HDMI technology for HTPCs. The big feature set is all here.
 

The technology is a cut down though as they are targeting a mainstream market with this. 80 stream processor units are featured here, compare that to the 320 of the Radeon HD 4670. These 80 stream processor units run at 600MHz and the card comes with either 512MB or 256MB of DDR3 memory running at 800MHz for 1.6Gbps of memory data rate and a max bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec. The card uses 242 million transistors with the second gen 55nm process.

ATI's PowerPlay is also here and AMD claims the card uses less than 25 watts under a full load which is great for a good general use video card.

A wide variety of the usual partners are onboard for the card including Visiontek, HIS, Palit, Asus, PowerColor, GeCube, Diamond, Sapphire, MSI, Gigabyte, and Club3D.

Here's a comparison of the 4550, 3450, and Nvidia's 9400 GT.