Club3D Intros Radeon HD 5550 Card with 2 GB Memory

[btarunr]

If you absolutely need 2 GB of video memory to talk about in your rig, Club3D developed an easy means to get there. Its latest ATI Radeon HD 5550 variant boasts of 2 GB of DDR3 memory across a 128-bit wide memory interface, and some out of the box overclocked speeds. The single-slot full-height card uses an active GPU cooler, and draws all its power from the PCI-E slot. The DirectX 11 compliant Radeon HD 5550 GPU has 320 stream processors, and a 128-bit wide memory interface, with clock speeds of 650 MHz core, 1200 MHz (2400 MHz effective) memory. Display connectivity includes one each of DVI-D, D-Sub, and HDMI. Club3D did not give out a price.

[Mussels]

i want the OC'd model to be called a HD 5555

and 2GB memory? beyond pointless. 512MB is all these need.

[CDdude55]

Originally Posted by Mussels

i want the OC'd model to be called a HD 5555

and 2GB memory? beyond pointless. 512MB is all these need.

Definitly agreed.

[scaminatrix]

not even 6 pin? not even molex? seriously?

EDIT: I suppose would be good for a low power, low heat, HTPC for 1 or 2 60" monitor/s or TV's maybe?
But still, 2GB?

[Mussels]

uh... why is it a bad thing that they dont have external power?

[CDdude55]

Originally Posted by scaminatrix

not even 6 pin? not even molex? seriously?

EDIT: I suppose would be good for a low power, low heat, HTPC for 1 or 2 60" monitor/s or TV's maybe?
But still, 2GB?

It's meant for very low end usage, there's utterly no point in throwing 2GB of memory on it. It's a huge waste of time. How about they throw that amount of memory on cards that are actually going to use it?.

[scaminatrix]

Originally Posted by Mussels

uh... why is it a bad thing that they dont have external power?

I just thought that to warrant 2GB of memory you'd need a bit of power to use it to it's full potential? Can't imagine this card would be great performance wise for games, but would be good for low/medium settings on massive monitors I suppose.
This card's sounding more useful the more I think about it, I'm just waiting to find out the price.

[CDdude55]

Originally Posted by scaminatrix

I just thought that to warrant 2GB of memory you'd need a bit of power to use it to it's full potential? Can't imagine this card would be great performance wise for games, but would be good for low/medium settings on massive monitors I suppose.
This card's sounding more useful the more I think about it, I'm just waiting to find out the price.

It probably won't be to bad for some low end gaming, but the actual power backed behind that 2GB's is crap, hence making it pointless for most people.(especialy gamers) If you're gaming i don't see much of a point in this card, just save up a bit and pick up a 5770 or even a 5750, theres much more raw power behind those cards instead of just an overly excessive amount of memory. And even for the people who don't game, it doesn't make sence to why they would pick this card.

[dir_d]

Well it is running GDDR3 probably needs the extra ram to make up for the bandwidth.

[scaminatrix]

Originally Posted by CDdude55

It probably won't be to bad for some low end gaming, but the actual power backed behind that 2GB's is crap, hence making it pointless for most people.(especialy gamers) If you're gaming i don't see much of a point in this card, just save up a bit and pick up a 5770 or even a 5750, theres much more raw power behind those cards instead of just an overly excessive amount of memory. And even for the people who don't game, it doesn't make sence to why they would pick this card.

Yes it's absolutely silly. Someone who justs want to "talk about having a 2GB card" would love this
Like Mussels said, 512MB would be fine. Less production costs, less consumer costs.

[Jstn7477]

I wish they would put faster memory instead of more memory on these cards. Lower end cards like this and the G210/GT220/GT240 always seem to be bottlenecked by their memory configurations. Using Furmark, the only way the FPS would increase was by raising the memory speed. A GT240 1GB DDR3 gets about 11FPS at max memory speed of ~2000MHz effective, and a GT240 512MB GDDR5 got up to about 16FPS with the same core speed and maxed out GDDR5 (3.9Gbps). My GT220 and G210 were also very bottlenecked by their DDR2.

[punani]

It will be great for advertisements.. you know, ridiculous ones like:

"Supercomputer!! -AMD 2.6 Ghz processor, 6 gig RAM, 1TB HDD, Powerful ATI Radeon 2GB!!!! 500 € !!!" and then they have these old/slow components like Celeron, ddr 2 and HD 5550 2gb.. They fool alot of people that way.

[Fishymachine]

How cheap is GDDR3 anyway?Seriously,why didn't they release a 5570 with a cheaper PCB and cooler?

[Tartaros]

Originally Posted by punani

It will be great for advertisements.. you know, ridiculous ones like:

"Supercomputer!! -AMD 2.6 Ghz processor, 6 gig RAM, 1TB HDD, Powerful ATI Radeon 2GB!!!! 500 € !!!" and then they have these old/slow components like Celeron, ddr 2 and HD 5550 2gb.. They fool alot of people that way.

They do marketing by numbers, if people wants more, they'll give more even if it's pointless. The fact is such vga won't ever use all that memory because it's gpu will bottleneck at such high resolutions. But is cheaper to put 2 gb of crap memory than 1 gb of good memory, and the ignorant will buy the one wich has more. Apart from hardware geeks, people still thinks memory is more important than a good gpu.

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by scaminatrix

I just thought that to warrant 2GB of memory you'd need a bit of power to use it to it's full potential? Can't imagine this card would be great performance wise for games, but would be good for low/medium settings on massive monitors I suppose.
This card's sounding more useful the more I think about it, I'm just waiting to find out the price.

electrical power consumption and performance have absolutely nothing to do with each other.


in this case, the ram is just useless - even a 5870 cant use 2GB of ram.

Originally Posted by dir_d

Well it is running GDDR3 probably needs the extra ram to make up for the bandwidth.

uhh.... again i am stumped by strange logic. because its running DDR3 its got half the bandwidth, so the ram is TWICE as useless. four times the ram it needs, at half the speed it needs...

[animal007uk]

2gig of ram is useless but i can see this being ok for gaming at 1280/1024
Looks like it will beat a 4650 and i used to game ok with a 4650 at 1280/1024.

It also would be usefull just for basic needs.

[CDdude55]

Originally Posted by Mussels

uhh.... again i am stumped by strange logic. because its running DDR3 its got half the bandwidth, so the ram is TWICE as useless. four times the ram it needs, at half the speed it needs...

It can stay with GDDR3, it's a budget card(grandma's internet machine isn't gonna see a difference). It mainly needs a huge decrease in memory amount as you said

[mdsx1950]

2GB memory is totally pointless for a HD 5550.

[RejZoR]

OMG OMG OMG, this will kick GTX 480 ass, because it only has 1,5GB of VRAM and this one has 2GB OMG OMG :P

[MikeX]

this is definitely lure the customers whose thought that "more memory the better !!". ofcourse not speeds comes from the actual performance of the chip itself and they are probably priced correctly these days on the web.

[Baum]

is ddr3 that slow? even on 128bit it might be fast enought thus 2GB is maybe good for massive screens plugged to it

i wan't a HD 5550 with GDDR5 as the gpu overclocks like hell and the ram should follow that

then add some 6pin soldered by hand and a voltage mod

[baison]

Smart marketing ..

i used to work in computer shop and when i ask ppl what GPU they have , many of them will reply with 128MB card or 512MB card "yeah it was long time ago" , i think this card meant to these ppl and trust me they are alot

[wahdangun]

hmm if this were 6eyefinity i can understand, but this thing is really MEH

[mdsx1950]

Sapphire should make a HD5550 Toxic 4GB card. It will squash the 5800 series lmao

[Mussels]

Originally Posted by Baum

is ddr3 that slow? even on 128bit it might be fast enought thus 2GB is maybe good for massive screens plugged to it

i wan't a HD 5550 with GDDR5 as the gpu overclocks like hell and the ram should follow that

then add some 6pin soldered by hand and a voltage mod

DDR3 has half the bandwidth of DDR5.

If you were to comapre them directly, DDR5 at 128 bit would be the same as 256 bit DDR3.