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by HB

The ATi Radeon 9550 256MB is a great low end video card ideal for people ready to take the leap from integrated graphics to a basic dedicated solution.

Unboxing
In the box you will get, an instruction booklet with installation guide and troubleshooting, the driver CD, this is useless and you will want to download later drivers off the internet as the drivers provided are years out of date! The video card itself, which is quite good looking as it has been finished with a red board and a silver fan with the ATi logo on it. Finally a cable for connecting your card to a TV set. Everything you need to get going.

Features & Performance
This card is for AGP and will work on older computers that have an AGP 4x or 8x slot, a more recent machine will have PCI Express so make sure you know what your PC supports before purchasing. The card doesn't require an external Molex connector from your PCs powersupply so even if you have an old Dell or HP machine it should work fine and extend the life of your aging machine. The card has both a VGA and a DVI port so it will connect to any type of monitor.

The video card itself has four rendering pipelines for creating 3D graphics supporting Pixel Shader 2 and DirectX 9.0. These standards are both out of date now so for playing if you are planning on playing the latest and greatest of PC games, this card will not be the one for you. However if you are just getting into light PC gaming you will be very pleased to know that the card offers over 10x the performance of an Integrated graphics solution (like Intel Extreme graphics) and older games (upto around 2005) will work reasonably well. I found I could even play Company Of Heroes on this video card albeit on low settings with poor performance but the important thing is that it did work and it was just about playable.

The card also features Video Immersion 2 which accelerates DVD playback and provides you with custom overlays so you can configure how a video will look when played back. Although DVD playback is accelerated if you attempt to play high definition content the card will struggle and the video will stutter. Aswell as that it includes Fullstream technology which apparently makes internet videos appear less blocky but with the introduction of high speed broadband I find that video is generally higher resolution and not blocky anymore. Another great feature is the ability to plug it in to a TV screen using a resolution of upto 1024x768 this is good but if you