Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4

Installation and Testing

The normal test setup used on ASE Labs consists of the generic Ubuntu 8.10 installation with no updates. We continue to use the drivers present in the Ubuntu repository for use with graphics cards due to the ease of use on installation. This is what most people will do when faced with the same situation and hence the reason why we stick with the same setup.



The screenshot from the Catalyst Control Center for Linux shows the driver version (8.54.3) being used in this review which was the one that was installed from the repository. There are newer drivers available, but this worked absolutely fine. Below the shot is the core and memory speed along with the maximum overclockable range. The core could only go to 800MHz and the memory to 1200MHz.

The maximum overclock we achieved with this particular card was a core speed of 800MHz and a memory speed of 1175MHz. Any higher on the memory and the stress tests would crash. Overclocking on Linux consists of command line work, so it isn't something that normal users will probably be doing, but it is interesting to see.

The system setup used consisted of an Asus P5N-T Deluxe, Kingston 4GB DDR2 running at 800MHz, Ubuntu 8.10 32-bit, Maxtor 80GB HDD. We are using the Phoronix Test Suite to benchmark a few games. ASE Labs will probably be working on customized profiles for testing due to the lack of fine grained results with the test suite, but this review is using the generic built-in profiles. The card was tested against a Sapphire Radeon HD 4850. Testing was done at 1920x1200 and at 8xAA/16xAF





The majority of tests are not graphics card bound which is a good thing since the 4670 should be more than capable for the majority of gamers. Even if there are a few higher end games, the frame rates should be acceptable even with a level of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. ET:QW is the only game in this series of testing that showed the strength of the 4850 GPU. We are going to include more games in future reviews than will stress GPUs enough to show differences, but for this card, the results are good.

Conclusion

Shopping around shows that the 4670 level of card comes in at a bit under $100. This is really a sweet spot for graphics card as the majority of people looking for upgrades aren't willing to spend an arm and a leg on high-end cards. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 offers solid performance with an excellent price point to match. Casual gamers looking to get some more performance out of an aging system should look to upgrade their video card if they already have a good CPU.

The 4670 GDDR4 really shows that mainstream cards have come a very long way since the first graphics cards coined the term "GPU." Today's mainstream cards can easily handle a variety of workloads including handling some moderately intensive tasks from time to time. It is good to see technology moving at a pace that allows a majority of people to have performance without too many compromises. The fact that the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 offers a fairly silent cooler just sweetens the deal even further. ASE Labs recommends this card for all mainstream buyers.



ASE Labs thanks Sapphire for supplying this card for review.