PowerColor X1550 512MB Extreme Video Card Review

The chips are manufactured by Qimonda, a subsidiary company of Infineon. These chips are DDR2 rated for 400mhz (800mhz effective), each being 64mb in size giving the card a total size of 512mb. This is built into the card, so it will not eat RAM from your system, unlike other cards in the same price range with Hyper Memory or Turbo Cache, which is simply a marketing ploy designed to give you more memory on the outside, but in reality it doesn't do much for you due to the slower interface.

As for the 512mb of memory, this would also fall under the umbrella of 'shady' marketing. Most games and applications today will rarely use more than 256mb of memory, which coupled with the fact that this video card is not exactly powerful enough to even utilize it effectively, just makes it look useless. It's kind of like sticking 2 gigs of ram into a Pentium I - more of a marketing gimmick than anything.

PowerColor was kind enough to throw in some freebies! They included a shiny pen, clear stickers, and a notepad.

I like the pen, which is a heavy, strong, durable, and classy looking item. Thanks PowerColor!

That about wraps up the Closer Look part of the review, now for installation and configuration.