Seven-year-old AMD gaming GPU continues to stick around — low-profile RX 550 arrives for SFF PCs

[Pelican Press 0]

Seven-year-old AMD gaming GPU continues to stick around — low-profile RX 550 arrives for SFF PCs

The Radeon RX 550 may have lost its touch but the seven-year-old graphics is still very present in the market. Although the Radeon RX 550 cannot compete against the best graphics card, ASRock has released a new custom model that caters to compact and small-form-factor systems.

The ASRock Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB (RX550 LP 4G) is a dual-slot graphics card with a 6.69 x 2.71 inches (170 x 69 mm) footprint. It will fit inside most, if not all, compact cases. Nonetheless, it doesn’t stick to a low-profile, passive design. Instead, ASRock implemented a dual-fan cooler on the Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB. Fortunately, the two tiny cooling fans only spin up when the GPU temperature hits a certain threshold, so the graphics card is ***** silent unless you’re pushing it heavily or your case lacks good airflow.

Specification-wise, the Radeon RX 550 belongs to AMD’s Polaris generation of Radeon graphics cards. Polaris came out in 2017 and was the predecessor to Vega. The Radeon RX 550, in particular, employs the Lexa silicon, a product of AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) 4.0 architecture and GlobalFoundries’ 14nm manufacturing process. Polaris has reached the EOL (end-of-life) status, but vendors typically have leftover silicon that they still need to offload.

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Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB(Image credit: ASRock)

Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB(Image credit: ASRock)

Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB(Image credit: ASRock)

The Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB features 512 Stream Processors (SPs) that can clock up to 1,100 MHz. The graphics card also wields the 4GB configuration. There are models with just 2GB. The GDDR5 memory on ASRock’s model runs at 6 Gbps across a 128-bit interface. The configuration works out to a maximum memory bandwidth of 96 GB/s. The Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB is superior to many integrated graphics solutions on the market and may perform well in casual gaming. Don’t expect to run everything at maximum settings or 4K resolution with the graphics card.

The Radeon RX 550 is a 50W graphics card that will merrily sip all the power it needs from the expansion slot. It’s designed for PCIe 3.0 x8, so anything faster is just overkill. Being a product that focuses on compactness, the Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB only provides one HDMI 2.0 port and one DisplayPort 1.4 output. The DVI port, usually on the ******* models, isn’t on this low-profile model. It’s not a significant loss since the maximum supported resolution is 5,120 x 2,880 at 60 Hz. ASRock also includes a full-height bracket for the graphics card if you want to use it on a standard case.

ASRock recently listed the Radeon RX 550 Low Profile 4GB on the graphics card’s availability and pricing are unknown. For reference, though, custom Radeon RX 550 graphics cards start at $75.

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