AMD announces Radeon HD 4550 and 4350

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

They're targeted more at the HD multimedia enthusiasts than they are at gamers, but AMD says that they should deliver good gaming experiences at their respective price points of $59 and $39 USD respectively.

Both cards are based on AMD's RV710 graphics chip, which is a cost-cut version of the excellent RV770 architecture.

RV710 features 80 stream processors, eight texture units, four render back ends (ROPs) and a 64-bit memory bus width. The chip is built on one of TSMC's 55nm processes and AMD says it packs 242 million transistors in.

Interestingly, both the 4550 and 4350 have the same 600MHz core clock – the only differentiation is the memory type, size and clock speed. The Radeon HD 4550 features DDR3 memory clocked at 1,600MHz (effective) in either 256MB or 512MB quantities, while the 4350 features 256MB of DDR2 memory clocked at 1,000MHz (effective).

Like its bigger brothers, RV710 supports eight-channel audio via HDMI and also includes the second generation Unified Video Decoder hardware, enabling smooth HD media playback. This means that Avivo HD technology also makes an appearance and will enable functions like noise reduction, colour enhancement and adaptive motion de-interlacing.

Expect boards to be available from the usual suspects over the coming weeks and days.

While they're right at the bottom end of the spectrum and unlikely to attract massive attention from a typical bit-tech reader, would you like to see us review these new entry-level cards from AMD? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

Thanks for the memory

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