The HD 4550 is an efficient card, packing wise. It is a smaller box than most of the steroid injected space wasters out there. A very pleasant faded blue with a chick and a sword on the front of the box. The box is a clean design that is effective in relaying it's strengths immediately:
* 512MB of DDR3 memory
* CrossfireX Compatible
* 7.1 HDMI Sound
* Energy Efficient
* Based on the 55nm production process (which equates to less heat and smaller die size)
* DirectX 10.1 compatible
* Blu-Ray/DVD playback optimized
* Windows Vista Certified
Opening up the box, the inner packing is nicely laid out and well planned. The video card was securely held in place in the top flap that wraps around it. The card is surrounded by an antistatic bag and dies not rattle around the box at all. The bottom of the box contained the rest of the goodies. The driver CD, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter (sweeeet!), the Composite cable adapter, a half height PCI bracket (that is a kick ass little addition!), and a RCA video barrel adaptor plug.
Now, here is my perspective... the half height PCI bracket is something that more vendors need to include. It takes them only a couple of pennies to include, and with the explosion of the HTPC market, cards of this type are going to be in high demand. The slim line cases will require these brackets, and a half height, discrete graphics card can take make a significant performance increase over the mostly craptacular onboard graphics options that are out there on the market. The inclusion of the DVI-to-HDMI adaptor is also nice, expecially with the inclusion of the HDMI 7.1 sound capability (using the proper drivers) which means if you have an HDMI cable and a proeprly spec'ed amplifier, you can pass your sound and video over one cable! Yummy! If you are like me, *that* is appealing. Also, on the back of the video card is a HDCP notification which means it should be HDCP compliant, if that is important to you (if the rest of your device chain require HDCP compliance).
The card is a half height card. In my past experiences, that simply meant "underpowered", or something you would pull out of your parent's computer. Let's go ahead and spell this out right now.... "This ain't your daddy's 1/2 height video card".
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