As unveiled back when AMD officially announced its entire Polaris Evolved RX 500 series, the Radeon RX 550, unlike the rest of the RX 500 series, is actually based on the new Polaris 12 GPU, which was not available with the RX 400 series. The Polaris 12 packs 8 CUs, with a total of 512 Stream Processors and comes with either 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit memory interface.

Powercolor decided to equip its Red Dragon RX 550 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1750MHz (7.0GHz) while the GPU ended up working at up to 1190MHz GPU Boost clock, which is surprisingly lower than AMD's "up to 1287MHz GPU Boost clock" revealed earlier.

The Red Dragon RX 550 comes with a single-fan dual-slot cooler, which should be more than enough to keep the small Polaris 12 GPU well cooled.

The Radeon RX 550 is meant to replace the rather old R7 250 and aims at those looking for a GPU that is better than an integrated graphics chip. The RX 550 should do quite well in the rather popular 4K-enabled HTPC systems, especially with low-profile form-factor versions. It also comes with all the latest AMD technologies and features like the Radeon ReLive, Chill, FreeSync, HEVC H.265 4K decoding and optimized DirectX 12 and Vulkan gaming.

The Radeon RX 550 should start appearing in retail/e-tail soon with a suggested price of around US $79, while Powercolor's RX 550 2GB could be priced slightly higher due to the custom design with dual-slot cooler.