AMD recently unleashed the new mid-range video cards of the Radeon HD 4600 series of the Radeon family. Unlike NVIDIA, who started their GeForce 9 series at the mid-range level, AMD is following the success of the higher-end Radeon HD 4800 cards with several mainstream cards, including the Radeon HD 4650 and HD 4550 versions. The folks at Sapphire were recently kind enough to send us an overclocked sample of one of these mid-range cards, the Radeon HD 4650. It will be interesting to see what difference it can make on game play. We will look at how this video card fairs against its older brothers, as well as NVIDIA's mainstream offerings from the GeForce 9 family. - BIOSLevel

Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC Graphics Style Review

Now Sapphire's overclocked Radeon HD 4650 card features 512MB of GDDR3 memory, 320 stream processors and a 1400MHz memory clock. The Radeon HD 4650 shipped to us in a box roughly half the size of that of their high-end cards we've seen in the past. The card's title is printed nice and large and a cute female with a rather large sword takes up the rest of the box's front side. Along with this are the various certifications, as well as Sapphire's improvements such as overclocked speeds and 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The back of the box lists several more features and awards, as well as that it plays nicely with Vista.

For a mid-range card, we can't help but call the card sexy. The first thing that stuck out to us was the heatsink and fan, as this isn't something we're used to seeing on anything but high-end cards. Alas, even today's mid-range GPU's require active cooling. The board also neglects any analog ports and instead features two DVI ports. We'd actually like to see some DisplayPort cards begin to be featured on today's graphics cards. The back of the video card doesn't necessarily reveal anything special. Another point is that the Radeon HD 4650 can be used in CrossFireX, supporting up to four GPU's in the same system.

For a mid-range video card, the overclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 pulls its weight. At a reasonable form factor and pricing point, the Radeon HD 4650 packs a punch. Consider the fact that up to four Radeon HD 4650 cards can be used in parallel with AMD's CrossFireX technology to improve performance further. While the card did fall behind in performance to the GeForce 9600 GSO, the Radeon HD 4650 offers a better pricing point, and also features some technologies not found in the GeForce 9600, such as DirectX 10.1 support. The Linux performance wasn't particularly what we would have liked to have seen, though no complains.

The NVIDIA based cards typically always perform above and beyond AMD cards in Linux, but this can usually be blamed on AMD's graphics drivers in Linux. AMD has promised further improvements to the drivers, so it's only a matter of time before we see equal performance in both Linux and Windows from ATI cards. Sapphire definitely has a great mainstream card on their hands with the Radeon HD 4650 OverClock edition. With the overclocked memory, the card is sure to outperform vanilla Radeon HD 4650 models, and should be able to play many of today's games at reasonable settings without giving up too much detail.