Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition review

1. Introduction2. The Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition3. Gaming Performance4. Media Performance5. Thermal Performance6. Power Consumption7. Overclocking8. Closing Thoughts9. View All Pages

The Sapphire card arrives in a box which features a well endowed semi naked chick in kung fu pose resplendid with sword. Strangely she seems to have been working on her tan as she has left on her sunbed googles.

Inside the box, the card is well protected with foam, and an antistatic bag. Inside the bag the card is sandwiched between a heavy duty piece of folded cardboard.

A driver CD, instruction manual and guide. No power converters are needed as the card gets enough power from the slot.

The Sapphire HD5550 Ultimate Edition is based on a rather attractive blue PCB and the card is dominated by the passive passive cooler. The dual heatpipe design wraps around the card to the rear attaching to another heatsink.

The rear heatsink further enhances the cooling properties of the Sapphire card.

This is attached to the PCB with four standard spring screws.

The cooler is a very attractive design and Sapphire have attached a branded name plaque to the front heatsink with two screws.

A close up of the heatsink fin design. The manufacturing quality is very high.

A vertical top down shot of the cooler and heatpipe design.

The card supports DVI, HDMI and D-SUB out, this ties in with the reference design PCB design.

The card is supplied at 550mhz on the core with 800mhz on the DDR2 memory. There are 320 stream processors and its all hooked up to a 128bit bus width configuration.

Power Drain

• Maximum board power:  39 Watts
• Idle board power: 10 Watts

Features:

• GPU Core @ 550mhz
• DDR2 Memory @ 400/800mhz
• Passive Cooling Design
• Microsoft DirectX 11 Support
• 320 Stream Processor
• ATI Stream technology
• 40nm Process Technology
• PCI Express® 2.1 support
• Microsoft Windows 7® Support
• Enhanced Anisotropic Filtering
• HDMI 1.3
• Dolby® TrueHD and DTS HD Master AudioTM Support
• ATI PowerPlay ™ Technology
• ATI Avivo™ Technology Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2)
• Supports OpenGL 3.2
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology

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