Sapphire has today become the latest manufacturer to offer a passively-cooled take on AMD's mainstream Radeon HD 5550 GPU.
The card, dubbed the Sapphire HD 5550 Ultimate, makes use of AMD's 40nm Redwood GPU on a Sapphire-designed custom PCB, and comes equipped with a heatpipe based wrap-over heatsink.
The custom cooler ensures practically silent operation, making the card ideally suited for HTPC use, and a trio of DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs should cover most usage scenarios.
Keeping to reference specifications, the card's core and 320 shaders come clocked at 550MHz, whilst a 1GB DDR2 frame buffer connects via a 128-bit interface and operates at an effective 800MHz.
Don't expect a lot in terms of 3D performance, but the card's real prowess lies in multimedia use. AMD's on-board UVD (Unified Video Decoder) will ensure hardware decoding of all your high-def media, and the card's HDMI 1.3a output offers full support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.
There's no mention of pricing as yet, but we'd expect to see the Sapphire HD 5550 Ultimate arrive priced at around the £70 mark.
