As we enter the final quarter of 2010, we're one year in market for the Evergreen architecture - AMD's first DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 compliant hardware. At the beginning of 2010 we covered the introduction of the mainstream parts, powered by the core codenamed Redwood. Redwood powers two of the desktop graphics product lines, the ATI Radeon HD 5500 and ATI Radeon HD 5600 series. To help achieve its price point and availability targets, the HD 5500 series was introduced with DDR3 memory (512MB or 1GB) at the time.

In July 2010, HIS introduced two new versions of the HD 5500 variants - the HD 5550 and HD 5570. Both are silently cooled and sporting 512MB of GDDR5 memory.

HIS ATI Radeon HD 5550 GDDR5 Silence

HIS ATI Radeon HD 5570 GDDR5 Silence

HIS HD 5500 Silence Specifications

Product	HIS HD 5570 GDDR5 Silence	HIS HD 5550 GDDR5 Silence
Core	40nm 'Redwood'	40nm 'Redwood'
STREAM Cores	400	320
SIMD	5	4
Core Clock	650MHz	550MHz
Memory Clock	950MHz	950MHz
Frame Buffer	512MB	512MB
Memory Bus Width	128-bit	128-bit
Power [Idle/Load]	10W/39W	10W/39W

In our tests today, we'll investigate the graphics performance of these cards compared to their DDR2 and GDDR3 equipped equivalents, as well as a Crossfire HD 5570 configuration. For fun and giggles, we also created a 'Pretend Llano' - a configuration to roughly approximate the performance of AMD's Fusion APU.