Shootouts

When Budget Graphics Clash: GeForce 9400 GT Meets Radeon HD 4550

By Vincent Chang - 30 Sep 2008

Temperature, Power Consumption and Overclocking

Temperature

With its passive cooler, we weren't expecting the Zotac to shine in our temperature testing. It just about managed to go under 70 degrees for the core, which is quite decent considering that the GeForce 9500 GT were in the 50s. These temperatures were more than acceptable for modern graphics cards and with the maximum safe temperature limit of the GeForce 9400 GT rated by NVIDIA at 105 degrees Celsius, it should be fine.

The ATI Radeon HD 4550 was actually not too far behind the Zotac at 58 degrees Celsius, even with its small cooler fan. Again, we were not too concerned about the heat here as they were well within the safety margins. Notably though, the 4550 was warmer than the Radeon HD 3650 that we tested, despite the fact that the 3650 generally had better performance. A larger fan on the 3650 is probably the answer to this.


Power Consumption

When it came to power consumption, the Radeon HD 4550 took the crown as one would expect from its low 20W TDP. It was slightly better than the 50W GeForce 9400 GT, though the idle and load numbers should endear the Radeon HD 4550 to those intent on building a quiet, low power system.

Overclocking

We also tried our hand at overclocking both cards. For the ATI Radeon HD 4550, we were quickly limited to the amount set in the Catalyst Control Center, which was quite conservative and only enabled us to hit 650/1700MHz. We believe that third party tools would probably do better but given that it's a budget GPU, we felt that going further was of limited value. The Zotac meanwhile had quite a bit of overclocking allowance and we were quite surprised to see how much further that it could go from the default, especially with its passive cooling. The overall impact of overclocking the GeForce 9400 GT was also obviously greater than the HD 4550.

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