HIS Radeon HD 5550 1GB GDDR3 Review

Testbed

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition
Gigabyte MA770T UD3P Motherboard
4GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3-1600 C7 AM3
Samsung Spinpoint F1 320GB SATA II Hard Disk Drive
HIS Radeon HD 5550 1GB GDDR3 Graphics Card
XFX Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Samsung 22x DVD+/-RW SATA
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Catalyst 10.6 64bit Drivers

For a fair test, we will be comparing the Radeon HD 5550 graphics card against it's bigger brother; the Radeon HD 5670. While they are both based on the same graphics core, the HD 5670 has all 400 stream processors enabled (80 more), features a faster core and GDDR5 memory.

Both graphics cards are being tested with the latest 10.6 drivers from the AMD website on a single testbed.

Temperatures

It came to no surprise that when placed on an open case testbed with limited airflow, the passive cooling solution didn't work particularly well. Over the course of 25 minutes, the temperature increases had shown no sign of plateauing. Once the temperatures pushed over 95c, we decided that enough was enough where we proceeded to cancel the test.

Luckily for the purpose of accurate (and more relevant) temperature testing, we then placed the card in an Antec Fusion HTPC mATX Chassis, where the graphics card reached a maximum temperature of 82c within 10 minutes.

As always with most passively cooled products, a degree of airflow in the environment that surrounds it is required for it to function properly.