Sapphire bolsters mid-range Radeon HD 5550 line-up with slew of cards

Sapphire has bolstered its mid-range Radeon HD 5500-series line-up with the release of a slew of new HD 5500 cards.

If you keep up with the coming and going in the graphics world you will know that a regular Radeon HD 5550 ships with a 550MHz core speed backed up with either DDR2 memory at 800MHz or GDDR3 operating at 1,600MHz.

Sapphire now has seven distinct HD 5550s. There's a silent model with 1,600MHz-rated memory, along with three 512MB-equipped cards and a 1,024MB version with GDDR5 memory operating at 4,000MHz. The core speed remains at 550MHz throughout.

Sapphire's glut of high-performance GDDR5-equipped HD 5550 cards ship with a dual-slot-taking ARCTIC COOLING heatsink, pictured above, and offer a choice of outputs. The Eyefinity-totin' model ships with DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI, whilst a slightly cheaper card does away with DisplayPort in favour of VGA.

We can see the DisplayPort version appealing to folk who want to take advantage of a three-screen setup for non-gaming purposes - video-editing, for example - and it could be a decent seller if pitched in at, say, £70.

Keeping in with the multimedia theme of the new cards, Sapphire offers a 50 per cent discount on the purchase of either the Gold or Platinum editions of ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre 3 media player.

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Decent seller at £70.. I think not….

At £50 it would sell well though.

All the 5xxx series are looking expensive compared to 4xxx. 5550/70 performs like the old 4670 which is looking a good buy right now :)

Methanoid
Decent seller at £70.. I think not….

At £50 it would sell well though.

All the 5xxx series are looking expensive compared to 4xxx. 5550/70 performs like the old 4670 which is looking a good buy right now :)

But you have to bear the exchange rate in mind. All mid-range cards have gone up in price, so a Eyefinity-capable HD 5550 card with 4GHz memory would represent (current) good value at £70 all in.

Also it's next to impossible to find a 4670 singificantly below £60, when they were £50 on release. We just got spoiled last gen with the good exchange rate :(

Posted by Methanoid - Thu 17 Jun 2010 12:10

Posted by Tarinder - Thu 17 Jun 2010 12:15

Posted by scaryjim - Thu 17 Jun 2010 15:44

Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH - Thu 17 Jun 2010 18:01

You can get the passively cooled HD4670 Ultimate for around £58 delivered:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158546

This HD4670 can be had for around £54 delivered:

http://www.svp.co.uk/technology/components/gpu-ati-radeon-hd4670-512mb-ddr3-1-pack-svpvalu003_graphics-card.html

Both cards use GDDR3 too.