Radeon X550 low-cost graphics card

Radeon X550 low-cost graphics card

 

Review If you aren't a gamer, integrated graphics may seem the best imaging option to choose for your next PC. Integrated graphics engines may be cheaper than add-in cards, but they can hit system memory performance hard, and since on-board graphics are usually only available on budget chipsets and motherboards, you may also miss out on key features such as RAID storage or dual-monitor support, writes Andrew Miller.
A better option is to buy a cheap discreet graphics card, and at £52, you'll struggle to find one much cheaper than the Sapphire X550.
The X550 sounds like it should be an entirely new product range, but is incredibly similar to the X300. The X300 is built using a 110nm fabrication process and is incredibly small, kicking out very little heat. But with only four pixel pipelines and two vertex pipelines, it hardly sets itself up as a gamer's dream.
The X300 has a 325MHz core and a 200MHz (400MHz effective) memory speed. Not all X300s are the same, however. Some employ HyperMemory technology, which uses system memory to supplement the frame buffer. Most cards have a 128-bit memory bandwidth, but not all.
The X550 is essentially a speed-bumped X300. This one, from Sapphire, has 256MB of memory with 128-bit memory bandwidth. It runs with a 400MHz core and 250MHz (500MHz effective) memory.
Abit recently launched the X300SE, which uses 128-bit memory and is guaranteed to overclock to 405MHz on the core and 255MHz (510MHz effective) for the memory - higher, in fact, than the X550. Not only this but, at £37, it's cheaper. We decided to use this for comparison, to see if it was worth spending the extra £15.

AMD Radeon HD 7970: 28nm Tahiti GPU Review

We have been hearing about AMD’s “Southern Island” family of graphics processors for quite some time. Even during briefings for the Northern Island series of products which ultimately became the Radeon HD 6000 series, news about Southern Islands was already trickling out. Rumors about these parts have been rampant for what seems like ages, but now, just in time to get all you hardcore gamers fired up this holiday season, AMD is officially taking the wraps of Southern Islands. More specifically, today AMD is announcing their latest flagship single-GPU, the Radeon HD 7970. As you may suspect, if you paid attention to Eric Demer’s excellent keynote address at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit and the resulting onslaught of news that followed, the top-of-the-line GPU in the Southern Islands family—codenamed Tahiti—features AMD’s totally new Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. In addition to being the first GPU to feature GCN, Tahiti is also AMD’s first GPU to be manufactured at 28nm, their first with PCI Express 3.0 connectivity, the first with DirectX 11.1 support, and the first to sport a few other new technologies we’ll cover a little later (ZeroCore, PRT, multi-point audio). There’s a lot to cover, so we’re not going to take up any more bandwidth telling the backstory. Up next are some preliminary details regarding the Radeon HD 7970 and other GPUs in the Southern Islands family, followed by a deep dive into the technology and a full performance profile of the fastest single-GPU money can (almost) buy...

We’re going to go into much more detail a little later, but here are some preliminary details regarding the Tahiti-based Radeon HD 7970. The GPU is outfitted with 2,048 stream processors featuring AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture and is paired to 3GB of GDDR5 memory connected over a 384-bit wide memory bus. The maximum number of displays supported per GPU is six, just like the previous generation Radeons, but the display output configuration has changed; one of the DVI outputs has been nixed.

 

The Tahiti GPU isn’t the only memory of the Southern Islands family slated for release, however. It is the only one to feature GCN, but new mainstream and “sweet spot” 28nm GPUs are coming too. The Pitcairn core will power the Radeon HD 7800 series, while Cape Verde will be the foundation of the Radeon HD 7700 series. We’ll have more details regarding those parts in the coming months. Before we move on to the inner working of Tahiti and the Radeon HD 7970 in general, we should highlight a few previous HotHardware articles that are pertinent to today’s announcement. Although it’s based on a new GPU, the Radeon HD 7970 shares many features with previous-generation Radeons, like CrossFire, Eyefinity, PowerTune, UVD, and more. Since we won’t be covering those topics in depth here again, we’d suggest giving the following articles a glance.

NVIDA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores

NVIDA GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 Cores

 The GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores has—you guessed it—448 CUDA cores arranged in 14 SMs, with 56 texture units and 40 ROPs. The reference specifications call for a 732MHz core clock with 1464MHz CUDA cores. 1.2GB of GDDR5 memory is linked to the GPU via a 320-bit bus and the memory is clocked at an effective 3800MHz data rate. The cards will require a pair of 6-pin PCI Express power leads and support up to 3-way SLI.

As is the case with most NVIDIA GPU releases, however, the GeForce GTX 560 Ti with 448 cores will be offered in overclocked editions by some of NVIDIA’s board partners. The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition card you see pictured here is an overclocked variant. 

The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448-Core Limited Edition strays from NVIDIA’s reference design in that is sports a custom, single-fan cooler and overclocked GPU. The GPU clock is increased to 765MHz with 1530MHz CUDA cores, but the memory clock remains unchanged from the 3800MHz (effective data rate) of the reference design.

As you can see in the pictures above, the card is two-slots wide and features dual DVI outputs along with one HDMI output and one DisplayPort output.