Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 Ultimate and HD 5550 OC Review
 

Graphics cards positioned at the "entry level" market segment seem to offer the best price-to-performance ratio ever, and ATI’s current lineup is leading the way. With graphics cards such as the HD 5550 and HD 5670, consumers can run games at mainstream levels, play smooth HD playback and enhance general computing with Stream technology, all without breaking the bank.

The current ATI offerings we are going to be looking at are a newly released pair of graphics cards from Sapphire, the HD 5670 Ultimate and the HD 5550 overclocked edition. Each card uses the Redwood specifications, but they also come with enhancements that will separate them from other reference ATI offerings.

HD 5670 Ultimate uses the reference clock speeds of the Redwood core, but adds an impressive heatpipe cooling solution. The HD 5550 OC like the Ultimate card also has improved cooling via a custom designed Arctic Cooling solution, but it also comes with a factory applied overclock to boost performance beyond that offered by stock.

With the release of the GTX 460, NVIDIA should have an entry-level DX11 graphics card on the market soon, so it is up to companies such as Sapphire to push the ATI card design to the next level. From just looking at these cards these seem like impressive budget options, but to know for sure we will have to put them through an onslaught of games and benchmarks and see if they can endure.

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