ATI launched its new, ultra budget-oriented HD 4550 and HD 4350 card series Tuesday, completing its transition from the HD 3000 to HD 4000 lineup. The company now offers a complete line of HD 4000 cards at all price points. At $49 (Radeon HD 4550) and $39 (Radeon HD 4350), ATI is primarily aiming at customers who either game or are looking to build an HTPC system. Users who simply need a second or third video card or who want a card that supports DisplayPort could also benefit from the new series, but are not directly targeted as such. Even given such modest features, AMD still hopes to persuade the market that it offers a more compelling part than NVIDIA, but consumers may scarcely be aware of the difference.

The Radeon HD 4550 will retail for $45 or $55, presumably depending on whether you spring for the 256MB or 512MB options. Both the 4550 and 4350 cards will carry 80 stream processors. That's fairly anemic compared to even the HD 4650, but it's still a 2x jump over the 40 SPUs previously offered on last generation's 3450 and 3470. The 4550 and 4350 carry the same number of SP units (80), texture units (8), and ROPs (4). Core clock is identical, at 600MHz, and both cards use a 64-bit memory bus. The difference, therefore, is centered solely around the amount of available RAM and that RAM's clockspeed. The ATI HD 4550 utilizes 800MHz DDR3, while the 4350 will run at 500MHz and use DDR2.



The ATI 4550's 512MB version is passively cooled.

Both cards focus on overall utility more than performance, though ATI serves up the usual helping of benchmarks that show it out in front of Team Green. Whichever cheeky little monkey slipped in a note about the HD 4550 offering more features than the GTX 280 deserves a banner inscribed with "Failed marketing BS of the year," but these new HD 4000 solutions do offer a solid array of capabilities, especially considering their sub-$60 price point.



There's marketing, and then there's just plain stupid.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

As you can see, the HD 4550 is marketed as a passively cooled single-slot solution and requires no dedicated power connector; maximum board power draw is estimated at 20W and should be considerably lower in any real-world scenario. All of the standard UVD2 features are included on both cards, including dual-stream hardware decoding, DVD upscaling, support for eight-channel HD audio, and an HDMI-DVI adapter. The 512MB version of the HD 4550 will ship with DVI, HDMI, and DP (DisplayPort) connection options, while the 256MB card will carry DVI, VGA, and TV-out via SVIDEO.



ATI says the HD 4350 will also be available

in a passively cooled solution

The HD 4350 will be available in both active and passively cooled configurations and uses a low-profile design. This might seem a minor point, but low-profile slots are often popular on HTPC-style cases, and ATI is clearly trying to hook this market. The low-profile product mix below $40 is an eclectic group of cards from multiple generations. NVIDIA's GeForce 7200 GS, GeForce FX 5200, MX 4000, and 8400 GS all make appearances here, while a single Gigabyte ATI HD 3450 stands guard over the $39.99 price point. Clearly ATI could gain some ground here, and profits are profits, however marginal. We've heard from a number of readers that they'd appreciate current-generation versions of ATI cards on the AGP, PCIe x1, or even PCI busses, as well as calls for low-profile versions of such cards, but there is no word from ATI on which of these combinations—if any—they might choose to support.

On a completely random note, I was quite surprised to see a low-profile 512MB GeForce 9600 GT at $129. It's not the cheapest 9600 GT on the market, but the $20 or so premium for its low-profile status is, uh, pretty low. I'm including a mention of it here because it's far faster and more capable than any of the other low-profile cards currently up and Newegg—anyone wanting to game but stuck in a limited box should give it a look.

Back we go to ATI, where these cards should match any wishlist an HTPC builder or user can dream up. As for gaming, Anandtech took these cards for a quick drive in both Crysis and Oblivion, and came back with unsurprising results. Yes, you can technically game on these cards, and yes, they're leagues above integrated graphics, including AMD's 780G (though that board remains on top as far as integrated solutions are concerned). When we (or Anand) say game, however, we mean "game at minimum resolutions with everything off." Turn up the resolution or detail levels even slightly, and Anand finds that NVIDIA's 9500 GT becomes a significantly better option—though that card, in turn, is vastly superseded by the ATI HD 4670. As for CPU usage when decoding DVD or HD video streams, there's little reason to think these budget models would show different results from their big brothers. As we've seen in other reviews, video cards outfitted with the same hardware offload technology tend to perform identically, even if they differ significantly in all other respects.

Conclusion

If you're in the market for an excellent HTPC solution, these two new cards pack all the goodies, keep the price low, and perhaps most importantly, are available in at least one fanless configuration. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a budget gaming solution, I'd honestly suggest you look elsewhere. 64-bit memory busses were considered a limiting factor back in 2002, to say nothing of today. That's not something that will impact the card's ability to drive a DisplayPort, decode HD video streams, or display a decent desktop or two, but it does mean that these two cards are both out of their league when evaluated as gaming solutions.

Gaming, however, is just one reason why people buy video cards, especially cheap ones. ATI appears to have hit every other market aspect dead on—now how long before we can buy a motherboard (or CPU) with an integrated 4350?