Sapphire Radeon X1550 graphics card
Groovy graphics card and a snip at £45
Review Since it bought ATI last year, AMD has been busy rebranding any number of chipsets and graphics chips in its range. Some of the instances make perfect sense while others are a cynical rebranding of an old chip.
In the case of the Radeon X1050, it’s an X550 under the heatsink, so it’s clear that AMD wants the customer to think that they’re buying a Radeon X1000 series chip when they’re actually getting something rather older and less capable.
Then we come to rebranding that borders on the bizarre, and we hold up as Exhibit A the Radeon X1550, which is neither more nor less than a Radeon X1300. The graphics card that we’re reviewing here is the Sapphire Radeon X1550 but as you’d expect the specification of the card is largely determined by the chip. What we have here is one quad from an X1800 so that’s four pixel shaders and two vertex shaders. It has support for Shader Model 3 and DirectX 9.0c as well as ATi’s hardware Avivo features.
There was talk that the X1550 would move from a 90nm process to 80nm but ATi’s spec states that it uses ‘105, transistors on 90nm fabrication process’ so why, you may wonder, has the chip been renamed? The closest we can get to an answer is that Radeon X1550 has unspecified enhancements that help to optimise it for Windows Vista, in conjunction with BIOS revisions on the graphics card. That message was delivered off the record and we’re none too surprised as it sounds like hogwash, but as we tested the Sapphire with Windows XP SP2 it was all a bit immaterial.
COMMENTS
Re: Power Requirements
I just got this card from Newegg. It does require a power connector and it comes with a cable to tie into your hard drive power if you do not have a spare molex. I have mine in an old Shuttle SK43G with a 200w PSU. Easy install, no problems. Sure beats onboard video. Noisy fan though, runs at full speed all the time.
Power requirements
Does anyone know the power requirements of this agp graphics card, does it require a separate connector, and will a 240w psu be enough ?
A lack of scale
I have a problem with this review: three cards were run through their paces and their responses plotted on three separate graphs for us to compare the results... but the three graphs used THREE SEPARATE SCALES.
What's the point of presenting the data in graphical formats (graphs) if you structure them so that the scales don't match anyway? Simply give us the numbers in a table, it would achive the same result and not make it look (at first glance) like the cheap-ass card outdid the more expensive cards.
X1300 good for only one thing
I bought an X1300, 512MB DDR2, for $120 Canadian. Every review I read suggested the card was a piece of crap; but it had one selling feature. The card I bought was to update my old intel gaming box (D865P) which has an AGP slot. The box now serves as a multimedia box running XP pro sp2. The card serves well enough on old hardware.I still have a couple of UT games and Quake4 on the box and they run OK. The biggest drawback is that since the card was installed my XP OS is dying the death of a thousand cuts and I'll probably have to do a clean install.
My experience and reading leads me to recommend staying away from anything touched by the X1300 series unless, like me, you want to light a fire in an old AGP slot.
