4650 slower than 4550!!

make sure the clocks are right, take a look in the CCC or download GPU-Z

This may well be a typo, but the 4550 is available with a range of memory types. You have the GDDR3, not the DDR3 (or so you said at the beginning). GDDR and DDR are not the same.

Not sure if this would make enough difference to explain it, probably a typo anyway.

It is a typo. The 4550 card is GDDR3. I thought that memory might make a difference but then in a test here http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2445.html the exact 4550 card that I have is tested against a 4650 DDR2 and the 4650 is way better.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/des [...] ments.aspx
That is indeed what the manufacturer says. However here:
http://www.gpureview.com/Radeon-HD [...] d-580.html
max power draw is quoted as 48W. The GPU manufacturers ALWAYS err well on the side of caution when making power recommendations. The overall system requirements depend on the rest of the system. If you look at the recent review of the Radeon HD 5770 (much more powerful) it doesn't push a quad core system much above 200W at max load. Ignore the crossfire.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/rade [...] 04-15.html
Yours should be less.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/tec [...] emory.aspx

Bingo. We're getting somewhere. Yes, for some reason it seems it is reserving ordinary RAM on the mainboard for graphics. But I don't know why that would be happening.

Edit: Actually after reading about HyperMemory more carefully, it seems it might be a technology to allow the GPU to use BOTH graphics AND onboard memory. I'm not sure about this.

Yeah, can you turn off 'HyperMemory' in the 4650 settings and then see how it performs?

The dxdiag reports 2042Mb as Approx. Total Memory on the Display tab.

I read the AMD article and the only thing it does not say is how to DISABLE this. Any mem sharing sounds realy bad to me...

That is unsettling, as it certainly sounds like it is sharing memory (which would slow it down tremendously.

As for disabling it, I saw someone say that ATI tray tools could disable it, but that was years ago so I don't know if it still works.

edit: b82's article is the one I was referring to

Run Gpu-z and report both the core speed, memory speed, RAM, and bandwidth --- basically the specs that your 4650 is showing.

The fact that you said 400Mhz earlier for memory speed doesn't seem right, i am curious of the bandwidth. If the system is simply not reading your card right that could be the problem, or the card itself is bad. Check on the retail box (or from wherever you bought it) that the clocks are as advertised as well (this will give you a potential reason to RMA).

Look for "Enable/Disable ATT Shared Memory" or similar name.

Download GPU-Z and see what that says too. I think in Win7, CPU-Z reports the correct frequency, which should downclock to very low levels when not in use. You could try driver 9.9 or 9.8 also (doing a reinstall of the drivers rarely hurts).

People w/ DDR3 variants have similar issues with shared mem. They do not have performance comparisons so they may well be seeing lower performance than what is expected of these cards.
As said in all tests a 4650 DDR2 always comes out faster than a 4550 GDDR3. If it were any other way I would not have bought this card and I would not be talking about this issue.

But from my experience if you come up to something like this you either spend a few days figuring it out and learning a lot OR you 've made a very bad choice... I am hoping for the first!

Any ideas how???
I looked everywhere in the BIOS, changed everything, have rebooted about 50 times in the last hour but I cannot find any setting that will allow me to prevent the card from sharing memory.

I have an ASUS P5QL motherboard.

I posted a link before. Here it is again. http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] ,2445.html

OK then you have no other choice to either live with it or return it and get your money back. This card is a pos headache in a box and it shouldn't have been sold. Try another ATI from a different brand or go Nvidia with its premiums.

I am not sure of the bus size of those cards, but I am sure that the 4650 has at least the same or larger memory bus than the 4550. In fact I think the 4650 is 128bit and the 4550 is 64 bit.

I had a 4650 DDR2 and was not at all impressed with it, but it definitely should be faster than a 4550. That said, I dont know why AMD puts DDR3 on a lower end card and DDR2 on the 4650.

Can a mod please close this thread. Come on people why is it so hard to figure out the differences between the two types or memory?

One type uses 16bit channels while the other uses 32bit and has higher clocks with better i/o.

Yes. I guess that's the case. So the card is a crippled 4650.

Any comments on how to disable the HyperMemory sharing?? I would rather have this card just use its own mem and not take up my normal ram too.
I have been looking around in forums and tech supports but I can't find any solid solution to this.

ASUS says nothing about this on the spec page and neither does ATI. If this thing is going to share my ram it should say.