AMD recently released their Raden HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4670 cards which are based on the AMD RV730 graphics processor. The cards are targeted at the sub-$100 segment and which is also where the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9600 GSO are positioned. While other board partners have designed their own PCB's to reduce cost or optimize it to their own design goals, Sapphire has chosen to use ATI's reference board design. Unlike the reference design, the clock and memory speeds are increased to 650MHz and 1800MHz, far from the maximum as our overclocking tests will show later. This certainly should be a great card with a good price to performance ratio. - techPowerUp

Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC Version Review

Sapphire uses their small packaging for this card. The front and back of the package have all the important product highlights. But dear Sapphire, please update the 2002 list of awards you have on the back of the package. As expected the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OverClock uses a small cooler with a single slot design. The card has two DVI ports which is the most common output configuration today. In case you need an analog output, you can use a DVI adapter which is included. To connect big digital TV screens you can use an HDMI adapter which is also included.

Sapphire's heatsink is a very basic piece of metal. You won't find any fancy stuff like copper or heatpipes. It's not needed given the low heat output of the RV730 chipset. And two, three or four cards can be combined in CrossFire to improve performance or image quality. An additional power supply is not required for operation of the card. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix. With a latency of 1.0ns they should be good for at least 2000MHz. The final overclocks of our video card are 807MHz core and 2148MHz memory. Both overclocks are stunning and make you wonder why Sapphire has chosen such low clocks.

If you are purely looking for the best bang for the buck in the ATI graphics card lineup then the Radeon HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4670 are definitely the best choice. While their 3D performance can certainly not rival high-end cards they are good for some pretty serious gaming. What makes the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC edition very interesting is the enormous overclocking potential left in the card. Even though Sapphire uses a rather small cooler, we could overclock our card by more than twenty percent, some free extra performance! This is an excellent added value but Sapphire could have done more with this.

Unfortunately Sapphire's thermal settings in the BIOS are not nearly as silent as other Radeon HD 4650 models. In idle the fan is very well audible even through a full case. Under load the fan ramps up in speeds even more resulting in high noise levels. This can be easily fixed though by tweaking the fan settings in the BIOS to the noise versus temperature balance that you want.