ATI Mobility Radeon: HD 5650 vs HD 6550

Which 1 is more powerful?

 

The 5650 is a little week I could never downgrade to it. Did a bench check on Notebookcheck single gpu's only, 3dmark 06 and vantage only and the 6550 is 3 spots above. The 3dmark06 score is 1000 points in difference. Still below my 9800M GS. No vantage score shown for the 6550 so i dunno about dx10 performance.

 

alright thanks a bunch, notebookcheck has been comparing the 5650 and the gt 335m as rivals, and even considers the 5650 as slightly better. i also know ppl often consider 6550 as similar as 335m so im just wondering which is better

 

Well for DX9 a 1000 point difference in 3dmark 06 is significant enough. But without further testing on DX10/11 and real world testing for all 3 not sure. What laptops are you looking at, what budget as well.

 

This is simply wrong.

The 5650 is a direct competitor to the gt 540m.

the 5650 is the 6550, with a slight bump in voltage and speed (core wise)

the 5650 is the best middle upper range gpu that you can find. highly overclockable.

The gt 335m lags behind it.

 

yeah clutch doesnt know what he is talking about. they are identical, only difference is clock and voltage. If clocks and voltage are all equal, there is pretty much no difference.

 

The OP never said he was willing to take the risk to warranty and or equipment. Only asked which one was more powerful. Overclocking isn't the first thing on everyone's mind, even though I would do it!

So your saying you would have no issue with downclocking your 6550 to match the speed of a 5650? That would be sort of ridiculous. Yes if you overclock a 5650 to match there would be no difference, it means it is also not a deal breaker. My 9800M GS is no different from the GTS other then voltage and clock speeds. BUT the GTS boards were build with chips that tested better than the ones used for GS. The 6550 is different in that its a generational rebadge, not necessarily a product of quality binning.

But unless you can point to something that I said which wasn't true then "clutch doesn't know what he is talking about." is fairly rude.

 

The 6550 is the 5650, just a newer/renamed version. They are going to be almost equal with the 6550 maybe coming out slightly ahead. Both are high mid-range cards. The 5650 can be overclocked easily to the level of the 4830, sometimes higher. I am sure the 6550 would be easily overclocked to that level as well.

 

you are %100 wrong. they are the exactly same in every way PHYSICALLY. stop bringing your video card into this, it makes no difference. The only difference is software which can easily be changed. the difference in 5650 and 6550 is negligible, they are pretty much identical. You don't even have a 5650, so on that alone i have more credibility.

 

I never said that there were not. The OP has still yet to express any interest in overclocking and only asked "Which 1 is more powerful?". What is up for debate is how negligible the difference is out of the box.

What I have spoken of is the fact that every chip that comes from every single wafer produced is NOT the same. There are minor imperfections from one chip to the next on every wafer. Not every chip will clock the same or be capable of running stable the same voltage. This doesn't matter to the end user unless they are overclocking as the manufacturer has already sorted the resulting product.

If you don't know that then I don't know what you know other then how to be rude.

 

yes but I am 100000000000% certain that 6550 are not 5650 with better chips. just stop

i do remember years ago when you could unlock special 9700 pros because they were better, but that is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT CASE

ps. :laugh: at your last sentence

pps.: whats worse, being ignorant or being rude?

 

I said that they probably are not

I apologize on not elaborating. AMD has no point in binning this chip other then good yield and trash. Because the 5650 is a previous product, all of the 5650 worthy chips are probably going straight to the 6550.

EVERY company that makes integrated circuits of this type, test those chips for clock speed and voltage stability and then grade them. Usually two or more brackets of a grade make it into a product lineup with different badges. Otherwise their is yield waste. This is also fairly common practice in the GPU trade.

To your side of the argument. The 6530 is also a 5650 as well is it not? This would be an example of where the lower quality cores are going Same core, different shader clock. But since the discussion is 5650 versus 6550 I did not bring it up.

I am not talking about unlocking cores that were disabled, I am talking about BIOS set clock speeds and voltages on identical hardware, which is also what your talking about. We are talking about the same thing.

 

OP: everything else being equal, including price - the 6550 is 50 MHz faster so get that one.

Also, if you decide to OC all 5650/6550 based systems that I have GPUs that can safely be clocked to 650/1000 where they will be pretty close to a 9800m GS in performance (9,000-9,600 3dmark06).

 

how do you know that there's been slight bump in voltage ?

I can overclock my video card by over 50% without changing voltage, and in fact that's how it works for the past 3 years.

if somebody however finds proof that the 6550 has higher voltage then it means higher overclock could be possible than that with the 5650

 

I think in AMD spec sheets it was specified. They now run at the voltage of the 5700 series, it was 1v and now its 1.2v, or it was in notebook check, I dont remember

 

thanks so much every1 for all ur responses

clutch is right in that i dont intend to overclock as i dont think its a good idea for laptops, with battery life and heat factors coming into play, the laptops im considering could potentially produce lots of heat too.

but it also cleared up a lot of stuff by telling me they r "essentially" the same thing. i guess i worded my question incorrectly as i didnt know they wud use the same chip n give it a newer name. i only knew that older cards could potentially out perform newer ones so i asked this. sorry guys!

im looking at 13.3" acer vs 14" asus Acer AS3820TG-6829, Notebook - Intel Core i5-480M 2.66GHz, 13.3" LCD, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, AMD Radeon HD 6550 1GB, No ODD, Wireless BGN, Bluetooth, HDMI, Webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium | Canada Computers

ASUS N82JQ-B1, Notebook (Dark Brown) - Intel Core i7-740QM, 14" HD LED, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, NVIDIA GT 335M 1GB, DVD-RW, Wireless N, Gb LAN, Bluetooth, HDMI, USB 3.0, Webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | Canada Computers

acer: i5- 480M 2.66 ghz, radeon hd 6550 ($729.99)
asus: i7 740qm, geforce gt 335m ($999.99)

notebookcheck.com reviewed both and determined both to be almost equal in gaming power. the cpu used for asus in the review however was the i7 720qm and the video card in the acer was the hd 5650 and used the i5 460m instead of the 480m offered in my retail, hence y i was wondering the diff as i could not find an acer model with 6550 in notebookcheck.

the trade offs r also very hard to decide

acer (smaller, thinner, lighter due to cheap plastic material, realistic 2x longer batt life, price, hardware is ~10 degrees cooler than the asus but surface temperatures get to ~40 degrees, hybrid graphics, quieter fan)

asus (faster in applications due to i7, better build quality, better brand name, cooler surface temperatures, 2 years warranty for all asus products believe, better screen with higher contrast ratio)

then again the keyboard also matters. i personally dont like the look and feel of acer keyboards with the completely flat keys making blind type hard, but notebookreviews said the asus keyboard feels bad when u type on it so idk, it "looks" nice tho

 

All of my ATi cards were desktop and I used ATi tool to oc, so its been that long for me. But with nvidia its in the bios, you just dump the bios from both and check. Haven't bothered looking what the ATi guys are doing these days. Eitherway, the 5650 could be overvolted to the same voltage assuming the bios allows for it. Cores being of the same relative quality the 6550 wouldn't reach any higher clock speeds at a particular voltage. It is possible but not relevant since you wouldn't know without your particular example in hand.

MrMM i checked the AMD spec pages, they don't seem to list voltage and the 5650 lists power consumption, but the 6550 leaves it out. I am sure its out there somewhere though.
ATI Mobility Radeon? HD 5650 GPU Specifications
AMD Radeon? HD 6500M Series Graphics

@goldensausage - One thing that was actually idiotic that I said and had zulu singled it out I would have realized it sooner. But the score is influenced by the processor as well so the actual score difference between the cards would be alot lower. The score difference I quoted is irrelevant to this comparison because of that.

So yes with that final thought in mind, I wouldnt worry about it. Personally Id shoot for something better if the money is there. If its not then I wouldn't sweat it. Take a better CPU over the difference in the GPU if it comes up. As far as your two laptops in that post. I think it starts a quad core versus dual core argument. I would take the 5650 for dx11 support if I didn't want to play certain games, the i7 for one game in particular.

 

^ have you changed voltage to higher on a GPU ? Because it's not that easy.

 

Guys,

Take the discussion to the sticky threads.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/504142-can-my-notebook-run-read-before-posting-all-x-vs-y-graphics-card-comparisons-here-read-before-posting.html

Thanks.