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The most obvious thing about this card is that it's half height so straight away should appeal to those looking to add some graphics power to their sleek low-profile Media Center box. The review sample we were given didn't include a half height backing platet but retail samples should include these in the box (we know Sapphire's version of this card does) - you might want to double check before buy one, though.

Another area where you'll likely see differences in final retail products is the Heatsink/Fan (HSF). Being such a relatively low-power card there's potential to have passively cooled versions, whereas the sample we have uses a fan assisted cooler. Thankfully noise levels from this cooler are not too bad with it emitting a fairly constant, gentle, relatively high-pitched hum that should be mostly blocked out when hidden inside a case.

It also seemed to keep the card plenty cool enough. Even during a run through of our Crysis demo, the heatsink and back of the card were only warm to the touch - as opposed to the scalding hot we've come to expect from more powerful cards.

As you might expect for such a low-power card, it doesn't require any additional power connections as it draws all its power from the PCI-Express slot. It also means you won't have to upgrade your power supply just to play the latest games.

Video connection options will vary according to the actual retail card you buy, but the sample we were given had a healthy trio of DVI, S-Video, and VGA outputs. The DVI can be used in conjunction with a DVI-to-HDMI dongle (something which, again, should be included with most retail cards) to easily connect to your TV. This HDMI connection can also be used to pass the audio signal from your computer to your TV.

The chip that lies at the heart of the HD 4550 is known as the R710. It's derived from the same chip that powers the entire HD 4x00 range so has all the same principle features including support for DirectX10.1, the aforementioned HD video decoding, and in the future will support the ever increasing number of applications that use the power of graphics cards to accelerate everyday tasks (the Adobe CS4 suite being the most high-profile example). What makes this card cost £45 and other cards cost £200 is the number of those number crunching components.

Most notably the number of stream processors (the core processing parts of the GPU) is far less than ATI's other cards, as is the number of texture processing units and ROPs. Essentially this card will let you run most games at low resolutions and, where needed, lower in-game detail settings to get a consistently playable framerate.

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