ATI 100-437105 Radeon 9550 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP Video Card

by ATI

Product Details

Product Manual [5.45mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 11.5 x 9.5 x 2.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00062N5AY
• Item model number: 100-437105
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 7, 2004

Product Description

The Radeon¿ 9550 delivers an exceptional visual experience for the value minded gamer and PC enthusiast. With 128 bit and DDR memory and impressive processor speed of its innovative .13micron visual processing unit (GPU), the Radeon¿ 9550 takes you to a world of lush graphics with a stutter free experience. Its 4 pixel rendering pipelines with a fill rate of 1.0 giga-pixels per second combine to deliver dramatic image detail which adds to great 3D game play and a immersive video playback experience.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice entry Level card, February 7, 2007

By 

Buzz Smith (Escondido, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ATI 100-437105 Radeon 9550 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP Video Card (Personal Computers)

First let me say that if you plan on playing the latest games in full resolution, this card is not for you. If you plan on just upgrading your on board video so you can play older games and have a DVI and TV out put, this is your card. This card will play Call of Duty, Medal of Honor at almost max quality settings with no problems. It will play Doom 3 with medium settings nicely. Quake 4 so so on low to medium settings. For newer games, you need more powerful card.

Another thing that annoys me with many reviewers here. They don't research the products they buy and therefore are dissapointed when a $79 video card won't play the latest game at maximum resolution. You have to have realistic expectations people. Those games require a very powerful video card. You don't take a Honda Civic to the Indy 500 and complain that the car is a piece of junk.... That being said there are plenty of charts that compare all of the ATI cards and rate them by speed, etc. This card has a memory transfer rate of about 6.4gb/sec. Not that great for newer games. Now spend some more money on say a X800 card and you will get up near 22.4gb/sec. Almost 4 times the difference. The X800 or better is what you should be looking at if new games are your thing.

As for Nvidia being better than ATI, I can't answer that. They both have nice cards. Unless you compare two cards with the same specs it is not fair.

Another thing I like about this card is that it uses the same chipset as the 9600. You can easily overclock this card with ATI tools and achieve 9600 card performance. Again, this is a great entry level card for games that are a few years old. If you want to play Battlefiel 2142 at high resolution, get a more powerful card.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Work of Art for the price, July 5, 2005

By 

Lansing (Des Moines, Iowa USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ATI 100-437105 Radeon 9550 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP Video Card (Personal Computers)

This is a great, fast video card for its price, faster than any nvidia card at this price and stable if you install the drivers correctly.
I gave this 4 stars just because the drivers can be hard to understand sometimes. Like I said this card ultra stable if you install all the driver "correctly".

Also remember to Use AtiTool and overclock the card to make it own even more :) .
My Graphics were 56.2% faster on doom 3 after overclocking it.
Overclocking the card doesn't really hurt it ether, because an ati radeon 9550 is actually an underclocked ati radeon 9600 with "double ram".

Overclocking this makes it better than an ati radeon 9600 priced at 170$, meaning your saving 40$ and geting a better card if you were planning to buy an ati radeon 9600 and bought the 9550 instead.

This is a great card for the value and I reccommend anyone to buy this if they don't want to spend over 130$ on a video card.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ATI's excellent low budget alternative..., March 26, 2006

By 

Fujimiya Razeal - See all my reviews

This review is from: ATI 100-437105 Radeon 9550 256MB 128-bit DDR AGP Video Card (Personal Computers)

I purchased this card as an upgrade to my HP pavillion a706n, for the purpose of preparing to run the newest episodes of HALF LIFE 2. I wanted the full directx9.c compatibility, but I didn't want to spend too much money since the newest cards are currently 1) too expensive, and 2) about to become outclassed by the even newer cards anyway. I decided to settle on the RADEON 9550.

It was very easy to install. AGP cards have that nice little hook on one side of the pin assembly, making it next to impossible to install the card backwards. Driver installation was simple, but one has to remember to remove any old drivers from old graphics cards (even if you previously had an NVIDIA card). The manual attempts, I kid you not, to confuse you with lots of recomendations to update BIOS drivers, Motherboard drivers, etc... if you have a fairly new computer, you can ignore these. Once that's done, you have to look up the newest Catylist drivers, which is found on ATI's website.

Now about performance. I went to ATI's website and sound thier demo page, and proceeded to download thier demos and screensavers. They have archived there many different demos from many different cards, from the mobility 9000 cards to the new X1000 cards. All of the demos wordek up to but not including the X series cards. One demo for the RADEON 9700 called "Debevec RNL", which is a realtime High Dynamic Range lighting demo, run like a dream and is my favorite I use to Demo the card's capabilities. Even the famous Gargoyle clock screensaver for the RADEON 9800 ran on this card.

Now about it's performance with Half life 2. I run my games under a separate account on my computer that I've stripped down and streamlined so that as little as possible runs in the background. I have Half Life 2 running on a Sceptre Naga widescreen flat panel monitor, running at the full native resolution of 1280 x 768. The processor is an AMD 3000+ 2.1 gig, frontside bus 400 mhz, memory is 1 gig pc2700 333mhz. Color is set to default 32 bit.

The game settings are as follows: Texture resolution = high; shader detail = low; Model detail = low; water detail = reflect world; shadow detail = high; Antialiasing = x2; filtering mode = anisotropic x2; HDR = Bloom (if available).

Running the video stress test for counter strike: source gave fps of 28.7. With antialiasing disabled, it increased to 31.8. A benchmark from Half Life 2 during "route canal" (dl_canals_06) , showing full water reflections, reflecting world... gives a frame rate of 24-30 FPS.

By contrast, Ravenholm shows a frame rate between 28-52. Overall, very nice. And best of all, there's no skipping of audio!

Half Life 2: Lost coast... Yeah, I thought I'd try to fry the card. I set the HDR effect to full, and left the other settings the same as above. I got an abysmal 13 frames per second. But it's not like I didn't expect it, after all, lost coast is designed to push even high end cards to sparks and smoke.

One caveat is that I've had a bit of trouble getting T&L games to work, but I believe it might be due to the games I tried being beta games rather than full versions.


Overall, if your looking for a graphics card that will give you directx 9 compatibility, give a respectable frame rate and not cost an arm and a leg, you can't go wrong with a RADEON 9550.