Sapphire Radeon HD4550 Videocard

Installation

There wasn't much to the installation of the Radeon HD4550. The card merely requires an unused PCI-Express x16 slot, preferably of the 2.0 variety. I'm happy to report that the Radeon HD4550 does not require a PCI-Express power connection. This could be a killer card for many low-powered systems.

Test System

I'm straying a little from my usual bench system due to some flaky hardware. This time around, I'll be using an Intel Core2 Quad system. Despite a different system, the system will still be running both Windows Vista Business 64- bit with Service Pack 1 and Gentoo Linux 2008.0 64-bit. I'll look at some of the latest games in Windows, and look at a few similar benchmarks in Linux including results from the Phoronix Test Suite.

That said, I'll be able to compare the Radeon HD4550 against several videocards BIOSLEVEL has reviewed in the past, but I'll have to be careful with any conclusions due to the fact that I'm using different hardware. Let's get started with the Windows benchmarks. I'll be looking at performance in Cinebench, 3dMark06 and Vantage, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis, Quake 4, and Half-Life 2.