News AMD announces Radeon HD 4550 and 4350

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/09/30/amd-announces-radeon-hd-4550-and-4350/1

AMD has this morning introduced the Radeon HD 4550 and HD 4350 graphics cards at the bottom of its Radeon HD 4000 series line up.

 

I think a quick less in-depth review might be of benefit. It would be good to know if they coped with video off loading and how noisy they were but not whether they could play crysis at 640x480 at 10 fps.

 

If these can take enough of the decoding off the processor I might be able to buy this and a Blu-Ray drive for a HTPC. I have a P4, mobo, RAM, and PSU.

 

I think the most i would put though one of these would be a source game. though i think i will get one for hd playback and keep my x1900 for gameing.

one thing though, if this is for hellping hd playback will the faster memory make any differance?

 

+1
I'd like to see the drop-off from the 4650 to these too, especially in some light gaming (HL2 for instance)

 

I'd appreciate any review of these as I'm interested in putting one in the next PC I'm assembling for the family, which will have a BD-ROM drive. So I'd like to see a test of how it performs with 1080p playback.

 

Yes please. Don't worry about doing anything indepth, we're just interested in whether they're good, bad, or somewhere in the middle. For a cheap multi-media PC or something for those a super tight budget they may be good purchases.

 

3870 vs 4650 vs these on Steam engine (TF2 maybe to be a little more demanding than HL2) and maybe something like COD4? Make the rest of the tests about video/audio, though

 

2nd'ed plus comparison to the main integrated graphics mobo chipsets (780g /8200 or whatever is just round the corner)

with the 8 channel audio, does that mean lpcm only or is powerdvd/windvd etc able to send bitstream these days?

 

ah this is what I was looking for in my HTPC, it looks like its low power too and a passive sink will most likely work well for it so yay cant wait.

 

I believe if you've got the right software (the latest version of either PowerDVD/WinDVD) it can pass any lossless audio such as Dolby True and DTS HD, as well uncompressed LPCM.

 

REVIEW THEESE BIOTCHES lol maybe play mount and blade with it? lol And of course blu ray play back and noise thats about it, maybe a subjective audio review via hdmi?

 

I wonder if you could run them in Crossfire...?

I'll take 9 thanks.

 

I read at Engadget, that CrossfireX is supported "in case you want to pair two of them up".

All in all, not a bad list of features for such an inexpensive, little card. I was actually in the process of building a couple of HTPCs for the homestead, and I'd be interested in seeing what the gains of using a couple of these in Crossfire vs. using them standalone, would be.

Also like to see how well they handle video transcoding. Now that they have a new digital camcorder, the family has gotten into home video in a big way. Of course the camera does not film in divx or mkv, and the files have to be converted. If I can offload that task to the HTPCs and off my main desktop, and get reasonable results, it would be a lifesaver . . . not to mention, I can finally get my computer back from the missus.