Board analysis

To illustrate the efficiency of their RV730 architecture, ATI outfitted their Radeon 4550 reference board with passive cooling. The card gets by with a simple black aluminum heatsink, no fan is used to cool the graphics processor. ATI doesn’t expect all of their board partners to follow suit, they believe you’ll see a mixture of active and passively cooled 4550 cards from their board partners on the market. This reference design is basically a concept of what could be done, unlike ATI’s higher end GPUs where partners are locked into the reference design at launch, for RV710 board partners will be entirely free to do whatever they wish


Passively cooled cards tend to run hotter than actively cooled cards – we saw idle temps as high as 60 degrees Celsius with our reference board – so some enthusiasts will probably want to mount a system fan as close to the card as possible to keep GPU temps down. For HTPC use though ATI’s 4550 reference board design is ideal. Thanks to its passive cooling the card generates no noise, and power consumption is low so you won’t need a high-end power supply to power the PC. In addition, the reference board design features video outputs for HDMI, DisplayPort, and DVI, making the card compatible with a wide variety of HDTVs. Again, this isn’t something you’ll necessarily see on final
retail cards, in fact to keep costs down it’s unlikely you’ll see this on many retail boards.


The Radeon 4350 reference board is a low-profile design with DVI, VGA, and S-Video outputs. Unlike the 4550, ATI mounts a small heatsink/fan unit to cool the GPU. With its smaller PCB apparently there just isn’t enough surface area on the board itself for passive cooling. We just received this board yesterday, so we haven’t had enough time for adequate testing, but we’d guess the board will run around 30% slower than the 4550 due to its slower memory clock speed, possibly a little more.

GeForce 9500 DDR2

To counter the Radeon 4550, NVIDIA has decided to lower prices on the GeForce 9500 DDR2. Cards are expected to sell in the $40-$50 price range, the same range as the Radeon 4550. Already cards can be found on Newegg priced from $44-$55 after mail-in rebate. The GeForce 9500 GT sports 32 shaders clocked at 1.4GHz, with a 128-bit memory interface pumping up to 16GB/sec of memory bandwidth to the GPU.

Based on these specs, this gives the 9500 GT a theoretical advantage on paper in comparison to the 4550. At the same time though we’ve seen paper advantages turn into losses in the real world, so let’s whip out some games for testing…