A few weeks ago, we read something that really surprised us, the vast majority of video cards bought each year cost under $100. Actually, the figure is more than halve. That market is so important that the industry calls the sub-$100 video card mainstream. We're sure that most of you reading this find it laughable, with your mid-range or high-end graphics card. Who are the people that buy these video cards? We suppose that the majority are people with off the shelf rigs like HP, Dell, and the like, wanting an upgrade from their integrated graphics and builders with tight budgets. We suspect that many of these don't really know what they want or need and are attracted by the price. - ThinkComputers

Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OverClock Version Review

The mid-range video card is something we haven't paid much attention to in the past. Oh, we remember when NVIDIA came out with the GeForce 7300 series, which is probably the first mainstream card we'd heard of, then the GeForce 8400 series. We actually had a friend that bought a GeForce 8500, but he did no gaming to speak of, and mainly just needed a graphics card. We've also seen models of graphics cards that we've never heard of at department stores like WalMart that obviously fall into this category, though they usually are very overpriced. The Radeon HD 4650 comes in a box about the size of a video game.

It is an attractive box, full of specs and features. Inside, the card is protected in a compartment of the box, in an anti-static sleeve. This board should fit into pretty much any case that will hold standard motherboard. This board is a factory overclocked model, the core is clocked at 650MHz as opposed to the reference 600MHz. The cooler is a typical single slot reference styled cooler. These used to be very loud, but lately they seem to be pretty quiet. The card sports 512MB of Hynix GDDR3 memory rather than the reference DDR2 memory used by many manufacturers. The memory is clocked at 1800MHz effective clock speed.

Okay, we understand, it is a little hard to get excited about a video card in this class. But this sub-$100 card has better performance than cards costing over $150 about a year ago. The Radeon HD 4650 has much better performance than the GeForce 8600 GTS, with a release price half that of it. Keep in mind, we're talking about a budget where $10 makes a difference, or a case that is too small for a full sized bard. And though this isn't what you'd call a gaming card, it will play games. Crysis is pretty much unplayable on the GeForce 8600 series, but at the lowest settings, the Radeon HD 4650 will make it through.

Sapphire has taken the Radeon HD 4650, added GDDR3 memory and has given it a little more fire by overclocking it. The little fan is totally silent. We think that the Radeon HD 4650 would make an excellent graphics card for a home theatre PC rig, probably the best use for this card. Full Blu-ray decoding and high definition audio via HDMI makes this a powerful but inexpensive card to run a home theatre. In a class where models are separated by $10, with the reference Radeon HD 4650 at $70, we'd expect it to sell for $75. And $75 for a newly released video card that will play DirectX 10 games has to be considered a value.