Ab Work Outs: MSI ATI Radeon HD4550 1 GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI Low-Profile PCI-Express Video Card R4550-MD1GH Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I bought this card to upgrade the onboard Intel GMA 3100 graphics in a HP Pavilion Slimline S5220F.The card boosts the "Windows experience index" for "desktop" from 3.9 to 4.7 and the "3d graphics" from a dismal 3.4 to a more respectable 6.1.Compare to a nVidia 8800GT (high end over a year ago) which gets a 6.9 in both categories.The improvement in even an older game like Age of Empires III is remarkable:from sluggish even at reduced settings to quite playable at max settings.

Obviously the giant heatsink is a huge plus for noise reduction:The card is silent (beyond what extra noise may come from system fans picking up the slack).It does completely obscure the adjacent (and only other, in the case of the HP) PCIe slot.The HP came with the smallest PCIe winmodem I've ever seen:It is as short as possible while still reaching the entire PCIe x1 slot.Even that tiny card would interfere with the GPU's heatsink.

The included DVD did not work.I was not able to run the "autorun" or even install the ATI driver directly, so I got it from the ATI (now AMD) website.The included documentation is slim and probably wouldn't help you if you didn't know what you were doing already.

I did not try the HDMI port, but if someone requests in the comments I will do so.It did install an audio endpoint so it looks like it has digital audio output for use in a home theater setup.

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Product Description:
MSI ATI Radeon HD4550 1GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI Low-Profile PCI-Express Video Card