The XFX AMD RX 550 Review Part 1

Published:
by: Jack 'NavJack27' Mangano Estimated reading time: ~2 minutes

Welcome to the review of the XFX RX 550!

Please throw some money my way either directly VIA PayPal or with my Ko-Fi maybe don’t do my Patreon until I fully set it up.

Incoming Marketing Copy Warning!

Optimized for the most popular resolution on the market, the Radeon™ RX 550 graphics card powers through the latest AAA titles in 1080p. Featuring 4th generation GCN architecture, the Radeon™ RX 550 graphics card provides exceptional DirectX®12 and Vulkan experiences with native asynchronous shader support.

Radeon™ RX 550 Series Graphics feature the latest Polaris architecture which includes the 4th Gen GCN graphics cores, a brand-new display engine, new multimedia cores, all on the revolutionary Next FinFET 14 process technology for enhanced performance and efficiency.

Specs

Okay just power through a little bit more of this marketing copy, this time it’s a little more relevant to things. Have some specs!

KEY FEATURES

  • Low Profile Design
  • 512 Stream Processors
  • 1203 MHz Core Clock
  • 4GB 128-Bit GDDR5
  • 7000 MHz Effective Memory Clock
  • PCI Express

I’m sure you get the picture if you knew nothing about the RX 550 up until this point. This is a low end offering and is only marginally better than most integrated graphics offerings. It’s a good card that should be considered for any cheap build you might be putting together for family or other casual computer users.

The specs for the test bench

  • Intel Core i7 4790S
  • Asus Z97-A
  • 16GB DDR3-1600
  • 120GB SanDisk SSD
  • XFX RX 550 4GB
  • Intel Graphics 4600

Since I don’t have any other low-end GPUs on hand; the only thing I can compare it to is the 4790S’s iGPU.

The tests that I’ve performed for this part 1 of the review are strictly synthetic loads.

The software used to test are

  • PassMark PerformanceTest
  • AIDA64 GPGPU
  • 3DMark Fire Strike
  • 3DMark Sky Diver
  • 3DMark Night Raid
  • 3DMark Cloud Gate

Test Results

PassMark PerformanceTest

AIDA64 GPGPU

3DMark Fire Strike

3DMark Sky Diver

3DMark Night Raid

3DMark Cloud Gate

Notes

This is just part 1 of this review. In the second part of the review I will comment on how it performs in games. Part 2 may or may not have performance data, it really matters on the games that I test. I want to focus more on how it feels to game on this card from a subjective perspective coming from the fact that I use a 1080 Ti in my own personal system.