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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
This just shows how far ahead ATI are right now in all ranges. nvidia need to step up. that 220 was never a good card.
That is a great card, very impressed for the money
Where’s the CrossFire numbers? Come on Zardon: No Slacking!
Its unfortunately not a self replicating card, but when I have two ill make sure and post the results 🙂
thats a really wicked little card for the price. surprisingly good
Yeah the temps are good for the passive cooler. seems a good solution for media
My buddy has one of these, he plays WOW on it, and Source games. handles 1920 resolution !
Sapphire are great, one of my fav companies
Great review thank you.
I had seen this card reviewed a while ago elsewhere and went to buy it, then forgot about it and realised I couldnt remember who made it, or the model.Just ordered one from OCUK
DX11, cool, decent game performance without AA, hardly any power draw and no noise.
Seems to be a winner 🙂
AMD really do rock. Awesome little board. Any bad cards in the 5 series? nope.
Very nice solution for the money, was impressed with temps
Very nice indeed. like the design too. quite attractive