ATI Radeon HD 4550

The HD 4550 is a more modest affair than most of ATI's range - it's small, unobtrusive, and squarely targeted at those who want a small, unobtrusive card for a home theatre PC (HTPC).

Accordingly, ATI has included several features that should endear the HD 4550 to media fans. The card is available with passive cooling, for instance, so it runs absolutely silently - crucial when any noise from your media-centre PC could prove distracting.

If you look around, too, this £40 card can be had with HDMI outputs that support 7.1 surround sound, and we're anticipating cards equipped with DisplayPort in the near future. Physically, the HD 4550 is relatively small, so squeezing it into an HTPC case shouldn't be a huge issue.

Also, the HD 4550 is adept when it comes to handling Blu-ray. Our tests - conducted on a low-specification machine with the GPU doing most of the work - saw CPU load at an average of 35% when the HD 4550 was decoding a Blu-ray movie

While our four gaming titles were playable with the lowest settings selected, the card couldn't handle any of these games at moderate quality levels. With the HD 4550, you'll only be playing the classics at high detail.

It's the same story with many of the cheaper cards on test this month, though - the only media card that can really handle any games is Nvidia's 9500 GT. That card, however, isn't quite as efficient when it comes to media tasks, so we'd choose the HD 4550 over that GPU with those functions in mind - or just save a bit of cash and get the HD 4350 instead.

Author: Mike Jennings