AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile the world’s most played games don’t require a powerful graphics hardware.
That’s right, I’m referring to the world of competitive video gaming.
AMD Radeon RX 550 Mobile
Popular games on both Twitch and Steam include League of Legends, Dote 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
There are several factors contributing to their popularity, but the fact that they can be used on almost any PC is certainly a plus. Even e-sports titles like over watch may be played on the integrated graphics of an AMD APU, provided that you are content with lower frame rates and resolutions.
At under $80 on Newegg, AMD’s brand-new AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile is perfect for those who seek a more visually impressive e-sports experience without breaking the bank.
The difference between victory and defeat in professional gaming often hinges on the ability to see more, faster, and higher frame rates and resolutions provide just that. The latest Radeon from AMD lets you turn up the visuals to maximum, and it also includes all the helpful ecosystem conveniences found in the rest of the Radeon RX 500-series, such as native broadcasting support with Radeon Crimson Relive, Free Sync monitor compatibility, and cutting-edge media technologies that could make the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile a hit with home theatre PC enthusiasts.
It has been quite some time since the ultra-budget market has had a graphics card to meet their needs. But should you settle for such a basic graphics card? Well, sort of.
Introducing the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile
Below you’ll find a comprehensive breakdown of the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile technical specifications, but rest assured that their sum is less than half that of the already affordable $100 RX 560, the final release in AMD’s new Radeon RX 500 series, which is set to debut in early May. It contains only a fifth of the GPU found in the Radeon RX 570, which retails for $170.
The Polaris GPU in the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile may only have 8 compute units and 512 stream processors, but that’s more than enough to power a gaming or media PC. It uses 2GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit bus and operates at 1,100MHz (base) and 1,183MHz (boost). There will also be a limited supply of 4GB variants.
Those understated inner workings, on the other hand, necessitate only a smidgen of juice. The AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile needs no additional power connectors beyond the Pie slot on your motherboard. This is a huge selling point for the majority of the people who buy this card: those who want to get more performance out of their current computers.
The AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile isn’t just great for e-sports gaming; it also supports cutting-edge media technologies like Free Sync variable refresh rate displays, which are quite cheap. While the GPU can encode and decode HEVC, the HDMI 2.0b and display port 1.4 connectors can handle 4K quality and HDR video. With that in mind, this little graphics card is something to consider for a home theatre PC.
Shortly after introduction, AMD plans to release low-profile variants of the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile, making it an ideal choice for compact home theatre PCs.
What we’re trying out today isn’t a stealthy version. Even compared to other GeForce GTX 1060 cards with 3GB of memory, this one is relatively large. Instead, a single fan and a plastic shroud over a small heat sink resembling a stock CPU cooler are used to cool the power Color Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile.
That should come as no shock. Since none of AMD’s Radeon RX 500 series have a dedicated reference design, and the AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile is so inexpensive, we may anticipate a lot of manufacturers reusing the same cooler, especially for the initial release.
Single ports are provided for the aforementioned high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) and display port (Display Port), as well as the digital visual interface (DVI-D), which may have been phased out of AMD’s standard lineup but is still useful for cheaper and more basic displays.
Got it? Good. Okay, time to see how well this dog behaves.
Our QA framework
The Power Color RX 550 is the most entry-level of entry-level video cards produced in quite some time, yet we are nevertheless testing it on World’s specialized GPU benchmarking PC, which is packed to the gills with high-end hardware to eliminate bottlenecks and display unrestricted graphics performance.
Using a Corsair Hydro Series H100i closed-loop water cooler ($120 on Amazon) with an Intel Core i7-5960X ($600 list price).
A modern Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard (now $230 on Amazon).
Corsair’s 1,200-watt AX1200i power supply ($310 on Amazon) and Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory ($125 on Amazon).
The Intel 730 series 480GB SSD ($280 on Amazon).
For $190 on Amazon, you can get the Phantoms Ethno Evolve ATX case.
Professional version of Windows 10 (currently $158 on Amazon).
The stripped-down AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile
The stripped-down AMD Radeon RX 550 mobile isn’t designed to play AAA games at a respectable clip, so this review will be a little different than usual. It is intended to replace the graphics capabilities of the central processing unit (CPU), and it faces no direct rivals in the dedicated graphics market. Since the GT 740’s release in 2014, no Nvidia GeForce card has been made specifically for this market, and the last time AMD released a Radeon with similar specifications in the United States was in 2013 with the Radeon R7 250.
FAQS
Power requirements for an RX 550 Mobile : how many watts?
We found worst-case gaming power usage to be 47W, while AMD’s official rating for the Radeon RX 550 is 50W. MSI’s RX 550 Aero ITX 2GB performs even better than its reference design thanks to aggressive throttling throughout our stress test (though not by much)
