14 DAY TRIAL // The DirectX 11 market seems to have genuinely grown into full maturity now that NVIDIA is preparing to launch its own mainstream and entry-level solutions. Advanced Micro Devices held the field for about half a year all by itself, but NVIDIA still came through, eventually, and reestablished the competition, at least on the high-end front. Now, some of AMD's partners appear to be preparing in advance for when the situation gets heated on the lower levels.
This once, it is Club3D that has broken cover in order to show off quite an unusual video board. Similar to how Sparkle, among others, put up to 2GB of memory on some of its GeForce GT 220, AMD's partner has taken the ATI Radeon HD 5550 and strapped 2GB of DDR3 VRAM onto it. This comes in addition to the boosting of the GPU clock itself.
To be more specific, the Club3D Radeon HD 5550 Overclocked Edition has the Redwood graphics processing unit running at a frequency of 650MHz, whereas the VRAM itself, on a bandwidth of 128 bits, is clocked at 2400MHz. Other features of the device include 320 stream processors, D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs and, of course, the full range of support for the CPU and GPU maker's technologies, including DirectX 11 (obviously).
The upcoming Club 3D Radeon HD 5550 Overclocked Edition differs, in looks, from its predecessors through its very low profile active cooling solution. Unfortunately, the exact pricing details are still unknown at this time. Furthermore, the exact date on which shipments are slated to commence has, likewise, not been unveiled. With any luck though, it won't be long until either surfaces, at which point consumers will finally be able to decide whether it would be worth it to place such a product inside one's computer.