So yer Im building a HTPC and Ive cheaped out and ordered a HD4550 Scan as the gfx card for the box. Thing is I didnt realise how many more cores the HD4650 has onboard. overclockers do a passively cooled zalman one so its an option. How much difference will returning this card for the HD4650 make, it will be paired with a mobile AMD 4850e, an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe mobo and about 2gb corsairs xms2 ddr2 880 ram. Will this gfx card be the bottle neck on this system or will it be elsewhere. Im going to be running games at the lcd tv resolution 1300 x 768 or whatever so its not super high resolution and dont mind toning down in game settings but will I be able to play current titles like grid etc to playable framerates? Passive parts only as Im in pursuit of silence! Thanks in advance! Dean.
4550 vs. 4650 at ProClockers. The resolution you're running is pretty light. 1366x768 = 1049088 pixels, while 1280x1024 = 1310720, a 25% increase in pixels pushed. So any benchmarks you find of a card running at 1280x1024, take the framerate and add another 15-25% to it. The bottleneck in your system is more likely to be the CPU, but that particular CPU plus either of these cards will match each other quite well. Besides, you can probably OC the 4850e at least 200-300MHz without even upping the voltage, and maybe a little more. I wouldn't worry about that much. - Diosjenin -
As far as I recall the 4650 has twice the ROPs as the 4550 (8 vs 4) and has a 128 bit bus (the 4350/4550 has a 64 bit bus). It also has 4 times as many pixel shaders (320 vs 80). The only thing to be said in favour of the 4550 is that it's available passively cooled (by Gigabyte). I'm not sure there's a passively cooled 4650. That being said I'd never use a HTPC as a gaming system. Also, I'm questioning how much performance you'd get out of even a 4650 at 1366x768 pixels.
