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Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 Review March 06, 2009 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Armed with a powerful, yet nearly silent dual-slot cooler and GDDR4 memory, Sapphire's Radeon 4670 GDDR4 appeals to the enthusiast crowd and HTPC user alike: the graphics card even ships with DVI and HDMI outputs directly on the backplate of the card. But is it enough to take down NVIDIA? See how the card fares in this review!
 Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 Review | Page:: ( 1 / 11 ) |
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Considering all this, ATI opted to revert back to more conventional 900MHz GDDR3 memory for their dual GPU Radeon 3870 X2. ATI hasn’t integrated GDDR4 on any of their GPUs since the Radeon 3870, and NVIDIA has passed on the technology altogether.
Now GDDR4 graphics memory is back, with Sapphire integrating the memory into their latest Radeon 4670 card.
4670!?
Yes, you read that correct. Sapphire has elected to use the high-speed memory on a sub-$100 "budget" graphics card. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Or perhaps Sapphire’s crazy like a fox? Let’s take a closer look at the card…
Board design
Rather than stick with ATI’s reference board design for the 4670, Sapphire’s decided to make a number of changes to their GDDR4 board. The board’s power subsystem has been completely revamped, and as you can see Sapphire employs a dual-slot cooling solution with a massive fan. Finally, the card’s backplate has DVI, VGA, and HDMI video outputs all built into the card itself. No funky adapters required.
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And of course, you can’t forget the GDDR4 memory. Sapphire actually clocks the GDDR4 RAM at 1.1GHz, that’s 100MHz higher than the stock Radeon 4670 GDDR3 specifications. (The RV730 graphics core on the Sapphire card runs at the stock 4670 frequency of 750MHz, with the chip sporting 320 stream processors.)
The board’s cooling is its most distinctive looking feature though.
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To cool the GPU, Sapphire uses a simple aluminum heatsink. The heatsink itself is thinner than you’d think, measuring just under 0.75” in thickness. While it is an aluminum heatsink (versus the all-copper unit on the ATI reference design), it is spread across a large portion of the card, helping to disperse heat from the GPU across a greater area. Aluminum isn’t as capable as copper at drawing heat off the GPU though.
To help make up for this, Sapphire basically pairs the heatsink up with a large diameter case fan. By employing such a large fan, Sapphire is able to move a lot of air across the heatsink without generating a large amount of noise. Sapphire claims the fan generates less than 20 decibels of noise, and based on what we’ve seen, we believe it: the fan is amazingly quiet.
To further enhance the board’s cooling, Sapphire has grafted RAMsinks onto the board’s memory modules.
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Accessories
With so many video outputs offered on the backplate of the graphics card, Sapphire has elected not to bundle any video adapters with their 4670 GDDR4 card. The only hardware accessory that ships with the card is a CrossFire bridge cable. The software bundle includes a copy of Ruby Rom, CyberLink PowerDVD, and the CyberLink DVD Suite including full copies of PowerProducer4, PowerDirector 5 Express, Power2Go 5.5, Medi@Show 3 and trial versions of PowerBackup 2.5, PowerDVD Copy and LabelPrint 2.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 2 / 11 ) |
Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
ASUS P5E3 Premium
4GB OCZ Platinum DDR3-1333
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB
EVGA GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB
ForceWare 182.06
ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB GDDR3
Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 512MB
Catalyst 9.2
300GB Western Digital Caviar SE
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/Service Pack 1
Benchmarks
Call of Duty 4
Left 4 Dead
STALKER: Clear Sky
Crysis
Fallout 3
Far Cry 2
| Fallout 3 | Page:: ( 3 / 11 ) |
Fallout 3 – DirectX 9
| Fallout 3 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9600 GSO (Original) | 27 | 63 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 39 | 81 |
| Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 | 29 | 56 |
| ATI Radeon 4670 GDDR3 | 26 | 47 |
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| Call Of Duty 4 | Page:: ( 4 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 4 – DirectX 9
| Call of Duty 4 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9600 GSO (Original) | 28 | 82 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 31 | 96 |
| Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 | 23 | 70 |
| ATI Radeon 4670 GDDR3 | 21 | 66 |
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| Crysis DX10 High | Page:: ( 5 / 11 ) |
Crysis – DirectX 10
| Crysis 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9600 GSO (Original) | 13.8 | 25.9 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 19.8 | 31.3 |
| Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 | 19.1 | 28.4 |
| ATI Radeon 4670 GDDR3 | 17.7 | 26.9 |
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| Far Cry 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 11 ) |
Far Cry 2 – DirectX 10
| Far Cry 2 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9600 GSO (Original) | 18.8 | 34.9 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 29.2 | 55 |
| Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 | 23.2 | 50.3 |
| ATI Radeon 4670 GDDR3 | 20.8 | 48.5 |
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| STALKER | Page:: ( 7 / 11 ) |
STALKER – DirectX 9
| STALKER 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9600 GSO (Original) | 18 | 48 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 26 | 57 |
| Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4 | 18 | 36 |
| ATI Radeon 4670 GDDR3 | 17 | 35 |
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| Left 4 Dead | Page:: ( 8 / 11 ) |
| Temps and Overclocking | Page:: ( 9 / 11 ) |
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 10 / 11 ) |
Pros
Excellent Cooling: The cooler Sapphire has developed for the Radeon 4670 GDDR4 is very impressive. In our testing the heatsink/fan unit delivered substantially lower GPU temps than ATI’s stock cooler. Load temps were 17 degrees cooler than ATI’s stock cooling unit, while at idle the Sapphire card ran 8 degrees cooler than our ATI 4670 reference board. In addition, the card did this while generating very little noise. Even during our overclocked testing the fan ran whisper quiet.
GDDR4 Memory: While we were initially unsure why a budget card would ship with GDDR4 memory, we’re convinced Sapphire’s making the right move here. In our previous testing with the Radeon 4670 512MB GDDR3, we were limited to memory speeds of 1050MHz when OC’ing the card. Browsing around online, it seems like 1070MHz is about as far as you can hope to go with the card.
With Sapphire’s Radeon 4670 GDDR4, 1.1GHz is the starting point of the card. That’s at least 30-50MHz higher than what you can hope to get from a GDDR3-based Radeon 4670 OC’ed.
The GDDR4 memory also scaled wonderfully, we were able to push the board’s memory to nearly 1.2GHz. You’re not going to get anywhere close to that with GDDR3. Latency seems to no longer be a problem as well.
Display outputs: Rather than rely on the traditional dual DVI S-Video/component video output combo, Sapphire has elected to outfit their Radeon 4670 GDDR4 with three different display outputs: one VGA, one DVI, and one HDMI. As a result, the card can be hooked up to a variety of different displays without needing an adapter. The only downside to this is you’ll lose the ability to hook the card up to a TV or HDTV via component/S-Video; HDMI or DVI is your only option. You’re also out of luck if you need a card with dual DVIs.
Cons
Performance (relative to GeForce 9600 GT): While Sapphire’s Radeon 4670 is a terrific performer among Radeon 4670 cards, it still falls short of NVIDIA’s GeForce 9600 GT in overall performance, which is its closest competitor in terms of price. Multiple GeForce 9600 GT cards can be found on Newegg starting at $85 before mail-in rebate, Sapphire’s own 4670 GDDR4 sells for $90 on the site.
Radeon 4830: ATI’s Radeon 4830 sports twice the number of shaders as the Sapphire 4670 and a 256-bit memory interface – twice the size of the 128-bit memory interface found on the 4670. As a result, the card’s going to perform significantly better than the Radeon 4670. In our testing we’ve found it’s actually a little faster than NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GT.
Radeon 4830 cards can be found on Newegg right now for prices starting at $90 – the same price as the Sapphire Radeon 4670 GDDR4.
RV740 around the corner?: While we normally don’t like to comment on rumored unannounced products, it’s looking pretty certain that ATI will be unleashing a follow-up to the RV730 GPU in Sapphire’s 4670 very shortly. This RV740 GPU is expected to be based on TSMC’s smaller 40-nm process and is believed to pack significantly more performance than RV730 with a sub-$100 price tag.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 11 / 11 ) |