Ati Radeon X550 Views

General Goods

Although Sapphire may be best known for its high-end ATI video card solutions, the company also offers a variety of entry-level ATI-based graphics cards. I actually took a look at Sapphire's X300SE HyperMemory card back in may. Today, it's time to review a card that is a notch up in the entry-level segment -- the Sapphire Radeon X550. While the X300SE HyperMemory costs around $50, the X550 can be found for about $75.

The Radeon X550 from ATI was not one of those cards that is hyped up for months before its release, in fact its release was sprung upon us quite quickly. The reason for this I suppose is that the X550 is simply a ramped up X300. Nothing much you might think, but that still puts the X550 in the budget class and it comes with a budget price. Look to the right column to see just how low the price of this card is. The X550 will give you performance worthy of a decent multimedia PC for a fraction of the cost. True you are not going to be able to be playing games with 4x Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering switched on, but a decent graphics card none the less.