14 DAY TRIAL // Since HIS went ahead and made the formal introduction of its fanless ATI Radeon HD 5550, there is no longer anything stopping its competitors from grabbing the spotlight and showing off devices of their own. In this case, Sapphire Technology has decided to bring out a video card almost identical in purpose and performance to the HIS 5550 Silence, but different in looks.
Sapphire's card is named Sapphire HD 5550 Ultimate and seeks to merge good multimedia capabilities and DirectX 11 support with a low power consumption and the lack of noise during operation, which essentially allows for higher levels of immersion. The adapter is powered by the Redwood graphics processing unit, based on the 40nm manufacturing process technology.
This GPU runs at a frequency of 550Mhz and is backed up by 1GB of DDR2 VRAM. The memory itself has an interface of 128 bits and a speed of 800Mhz. Other specifications include 320 Stream processors, a blue, full-size PCB and DVI, D-Sub and HDMI outputs.
As all devices from the Radeon HD 5000 series, the Sapphire HD 5550 Ultimate supports not only DirectX 10.1 graphics, but also the latest incarnation of this graphics technology, the now-famous DirectX 11. As for multimedia support, the board boasts an on-board hardware UVD (Unified Video decoder), which reduces the load on the CPU when playing Blu-ray/DVD content in VC-1, H.264 and Mpeg formats. Of course, the 1,080p picture quality is fully supported, as is HDMI 1.3.
The main distinctive element of the adapter is, predictably, its cooling mechanism, made up of two heatpipes that lead the heat away from the GPU and into an aluminum heatsink, composed of multiple parts set both on the front of the PCB, as well as on the back. The Sapphire HD 5550 Ultimate is already available for pre-order, at a price as low as 79 Euro.