ATI Radeon HD 4350 and 4550: Great HTPC Solutions
by Derek Wilson on September 30, 2008 12:45 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Oooh, new GPUs from AMD - however these ones aren't going to be breaking any performance records, they are both priced below $60.
The Radeon HD 4350 and 4550 are slotted in between integrated graphics and the set of hardware we took a look at recently in our Radeon 4670 review. The Radeon HD 4550 will run you around $45 - $55, while the Radeon HD 4350 will be priced at $39. Generally speaking, if you're a gamer you're not spending any less than $150 for a graphics card - so these GPUs are mostly for enabling hardware Blu-ray acceleration or providing a boost in performance over games running on integrated graphics.
| ATI Radeon HD 4870 | ATI Radeon HD 4850 | ATI Radeon HD 4670 | ATI Radeon HD 4650 | ATI Radeon HD 4550 | ATI Radeon HD 4350 | ATI Radeon HD 3870 | |
| Stream Processors | 800 | 800 | 320 | 320 | 80 | 80 | 320 |
| Texture Units | 40 | 40 | 32 | 32 | 8 | 8 | 16 |
| ROPs | 16 | 16 | 8 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 16 |
| Core Clock | 750MHz | 625MHz | 750MHz | 600MHz | 600MHz | 600MHz | 775MHz+ |
| Memory Clock | 900MHz (3600MHz data rate) GDDR5 | 993MHz (1986MHz data rate) GDDR3 | 1000MHz (2000MHz data rate) GDDR3 or 900MHz (1800MHz data rate) DDR3 |
500MHz (1000MHz data rate) DDR2 | 800MHz (1600MHz data rate) DDR3 | 500MHz (1000MHz data rate) DDR2 | 1125MHz (2250MHz data rate) GDDR3 |
| Memory Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit | 64-bit | 256-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 512MB | 512MB | 512MB GDDR3 or 1GB DDR3 | 512MB | 512MB or 256MB | 256MB | 512MB |
| Transistor Count | 956M | 956M | 514M | 514M | 242M | 242M | 666M |
| Die Size | 260 mm2 | 260 mm2 | 146 mm2 | 146 mm2 | ? | ? | 118 mm2 |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm | TSMC 55nm |
| Price Point | $299 | $199 | $79 | $69 | $45 - $55 | $39 | $199 |
While the Radeon HD 4670 was quite impressive with 320 stream processors, the same number that was in last year's Radeon HD 3870, the 4350 and 4550 only have 80 SPs. That's twice the number of SPs in AMD's 780G, the current highest performing IGP solution on the market. In our Radeon HD 4670 review we found that the GPU was fast enough for pretty much all current generation games at resolutions up to 1280 x 1024, but with only 1/4 the shader power of its $75 brother we don't have high gaming expectations from these cards.
Both the 4550 and 4350 are mated with a 64-bit memory interface and either a DDR2 or DDR3 frame buffer. With very little memory bandwidth, and very little processing power you need to have good expectations for these cards.
The competition from NVIDIA is a little blurrier; while the GeForce 9400 GT is priced more in line with where we expect these cards to end up, NVIDIA does have one trick up its sleeve. The GeForce 9500 GT, paired with 256MB of DDR2 memory (the same type you'd get on your desktop) is priced at around $65 - $70 but is currently available with a $15 - $20 mail in rebate, bringing it down to the about same pricepoint as the Radeon HD 4550.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
Basilisk - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
"The Radeon HD 4350 is an even cheaper alternative to adding 8-channel LPCM output and ...". Please enlighten me how 8-channel is possible on a card w/o HDMI. Are they using Magic? Or is there a way to extract it w/o HDMI? Or is the card they showed in the photo an example of a 4350 that's too-cheap to offer 8-channel? Or....Quite possibly I missed the obvious, but I didn't find any 4350's on the ATI site to double check this. Or, perhaps this review had a bit too much sales blurb and too little testing? I agree with others who feel that if you're going to hype 8-channel and HTPC, you ought to be performing quantitative/qualitative tests.
Veerappan - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
As Natfly mentioned, they use an adapter to transform one of the DVI ports into HDMI (with some of the DVI pins carrying audio data).It's probably the same adapter that came in the box of my 4850.
Basilisk - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
Oh! Then... it's not a DVI-D dual-port card, despite the use of that connector?! Or, they diddle a non-data pin (like +5v for monitor stand-by) to permit both DVI-D/dp and audio? 'Spose that's too much out of an inexpensive card... Thanks for the info!Zoomer - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
If they are DVI-D, the DVI-A pins are avaliable for use.If not, there are always unused pins, extra ground pins, etc.
Natfly - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
They send the audio over dvi, an adapter from ati will turn the dvi input to hdmi output w/ video + audio. I assume the retail packaging would ship with the adapter.ie
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
toyota - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
as usual you have some wrong numbers in the charts. the 4650/4670 have 32 texture units not 16. whats strange is that you actually corrected it in the 4670 review only to make the mistake again in these charts.vlado08 - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
I also expect comparison of video quality between nVIDIA Ati and IntelMore explanation about video processing what does this specs mean are they possible to turn off:
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
Is it possible to select the video output range 16-235 vs 0-255 manually?
I expect that there will be more in dept article for HTPC and mabe there you will explain what should we pay attention to.
vlado08 - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
Just to addGive us a screen shot comparison of the driver setting pages of the Ati nVIDIA Intel.
I want to know what settings are possible with Clear Video vs Avivo HD vs Purevideo HD.
Also about how do we select colors rec BT 601 vs rec BT 709
pfroo40 - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
I would have appreciated it if they had included a video quality comparison for this new crop of HTPC cards. I made the mistake of buying a cheap 3450 for bluray, which does accelerates fine but has low image quality. It'd be useful for my next purchase if I had more to base a comparison on. Otherwise, so far it looks like the passively cooled 4550 would be a solid upgrade.Dribble - Tuesday, September 30, 2008 - link
I agree - it's not a good HTPC solution if it doesn't give you the same playback quality as a high end card. You didn't test that so you can't really make a judgement, and hence have no basis for saying it is.