Radeon HD 4550 

If you are building a media PC on the tightest possible budget, the HD 3450 would still your weapon of choice.

While you can certainly play most games at modest resolutions with some eye candy, many people have just gotten used to turning up everything to the max to match what they see on marketing and review screenshots.

This makes it a prime candidate for a media PC where silence is key.

Under load and peak it is also among the most modest cards with a very low power draw.

While they are only of secondary concern for you as the end user, they show how well AMD did their job engineering an efficient GPU that runs well without drawing loads of power.

AMD has achieved an amazingly low power consumption with their new Radeon HD 4550.

On the HD 3000 Series you could go up to 5.1 audio over the HDMI link, now 7.1 is supported.

The HDMI Audio device is integrated in the GPU, which means that you won't have to feed an external audio signal to the card like on NVIDIA.

The previous HD 3000 Series had only 5.1 audio support over HDMI.

The Radeon HD 4550 is dominated by the big black passive heatsink, it also uses a single slot which is often crucial in media PC designs.

The cards are targeted at the entry level segment with focus on HD media playback.

In idle it delivers the lowest power consumption we ever saw during testing.

Also I would like to mention the extremely low power consumption and overclocking potential of this card.