ATI AIB partners have started shipping HD 5500 series cards with GDDR5 memory in an effort to improve performance and, more importantly, make lives easier for their marketing departments.

This really isn’t big news in itself, but there is one interesting fact to consider. As of now, the Radeon HD 5550 is available in DDR2, DDR3, GDDR4 and GDDR5 flavours. The HD 5570 also got the GDDR5 treatment and it should sell for around €80 with the new, faster memory. Of course, we’d still advise you to go for the good old HD 4850 instead, as it sells in the same price range.

This is probably the first time that a single graphics card is available with so many different types of memory. Although the HD 5550 is not exactly a powerful card, it could serve as a yardstick in comparing the impact of memory on performance. It is also a testament to the flexibility of AMD’s 800 series GPU architecture and the foresight of its engineers.