SAPPHIRE Technology has just added a new silent cooled model to its extensive range of ATI-based graphics cards. The award winning ULTIMATE Series is SAPPHIRE Technology’s Silent Cooled product line. The SAPPHIRE HD 5550 ULTIMATE is a new graphics card aimed at the normal market, amid sharing many of the exciting features of the latest high end series.
The SAPPHIRE HD 5500 series supports the advanced graphical features of Microsoft DirectX 11. Its designed to consume low power levels, while delivering outstanding video clarity and visual effects. The ULTIMATE series is equipped with 1GB of DDR2 memory, with clock speeds of 550MHz core and 800MHz effective for the memory. It supports Microsoft DirectX 11 and has 320 Stream processors. The whole graphics system is cooled by a heat pipe based wrap over heat sink, with no fan, which makes it totally silent in operation and no maintenance is required.
The SAPPHIRE HD 5500 series is fully companionable with current DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications. It is ideal for media applications, as it has an on board hardware UVD, which tends to reduce CPU load and directs to deliver smooth decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H. 264 codecs, in addition to MPEG files.
Native CrossFire support allows two or more cards to be used together for additional performance on a suitable CrossFireX compatible mainboard. On the HD 5500 series, CrossFireX is supported in software by the driver, and no additional interconnect is required.
The card offers DVI, HDMI and VGA outputs while conforming to the HDMI 1.3a standard for full support on Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. ATI’s on-board Unified Video Decoder will provide hardware decoding of all Hi-Def media. Though pricing so far has not been declared, but expect it to be in the region of £70/$90.
Tags: ati, cpu load, directx 9, directx10, dolby truehd, h 264, mainboard