Introduction

With all the hype of the X800 Pro and X800 XT in play over the past few weeks, the latest value range Radeon 9550 chip to enter the market place has gone slightly forgotten with very little media coverage.

When nVidia released their 128-bit bus enabled GeForce FX 5500 based on the slower 64-bit bus FX 5200 core and the FX 5700LE based on the FX5700 core a little while ago, a strong market presence was generated for nVidia while ATI were slightly left out. Their value 64-bit bus Radeon 9200 wasn’t able to compete with the mentioned cards and while the Radeon 9600 XT was faster, it was also more expensive making it unsuitable for this market segment.

What we want to find out today is how the new ATI Radeon 9550 compares against nVidia’s FX 5500 and FX 5700LE GPUs as each company battles it out for this value to mid range graphics section of the market. We have two different versions of the Radeon 9550 here which we will have a look at today - one from PowerColor which follows the reference design from ATI and the other from GeCube that is a slightly modified version and dubbed as the 9550 Extreme.

Let’s have a look at what the new Radeon 9550 offers us and see how it performs against the competition from nVidia in this often forgotten market segment.







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