Sapphire HD 5500 Mainstream Graphics Series Expanded

With the high-end market no longer solely under its thumb, ATI, business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, has naturally decided to exploit those areas that NVIDIA has not yet managed to get to. Currently, there are no mainstream Fermi boards and, unsurprisingly, partners of the Sunnyvale, California-based company are already trying to exploit this. Sapphire, for instance, has just announced the expansion of its HD 5500 series.

Unlike what some may tend to believe, Sapphire didn't unleash custom versions of two cards. In fact, the two newcomers are but slightly different versions of the same HD 5550. What differentiates them is the fact that the HM model has support for HyperMemory, a technology which confers upon end-users the possibility of dedicating up to 3840MB of RAM for graphics needs under Windows Vista or 7.

Needless to day, Sapphire's products support DirectX 11 graphics, ATI Stream technology, CrossFireX and ATI Eyefinity. Finally, the hardware maker has even entered an alliance with ArcSoft, meant to give buyers of the HD 5550 video controllers a 50% discount on upgrading their TotalMedia Theatre 3 media player to Gold or Platinum versions. This offer will last until August 30.

The rest of the feature set is completely identical for both devices. 320 stream processors are present, as are 512MB of GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 4000MHz. The graphics processor itself operates at 550MHz and the memory interface is of 128 bits. Furthermore, the cards connect to displays via DVI, D-Sub and HDMI outputs.

As for cooling, each of the blue-colored newcomers has its own Arctic Fansink, obviously developed by Arctic Cooling, which takes up two PCI Express slots. Unfortunately, the company wasn't exactly generous when it came to pricing or availability details, or, indeed, even the actual names of the cards, though it shouldn't take long for them to be made public.