These days when you think video board you think high end gaming right? Well first, not everyone is a gamer and not every card is built for that purpose. Should someone who only uses their computer for media or casual internet usage spend hundreds of dollars on a blazing fast graphics card? On the other hand you want cutting edge technology available to you without the huge expense right. Well ATI has recently released their Radeon HD 4600 line of cards aimed at just that group of people. It is targeted at the mainstream user who might game casually on not so extreme settings, or at a big lower resolutions but likes to kick back and watch a high definition movie on their down time. - Overclockers Club

Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC 512MB Version Review

The Radeon HD 4650 is based off of the 55nm RV730, which is the same GPU used it it's bigger brother the Radeon HD 4670 and has 320 stream processors and 512MB of memory. Sapphire takes their Radeon HD 4650 a step further and overclocks it to produce even more power to give you that boost you need when it is most critical. And with many years of proven design Sapphire takes their knowledge in graphics cards to improve this card to the best it can be. This card comes packed with enough features to allow you to get the most out of your system while not breaking the bank to do so, which is hat we all seek for.

With DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.0 you will not have to upgrade this card for some time to come. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 comes packaged in a nice small box so there is not a lot of bulk and extra weight. The package features a Sapphire mascot on the front with some logos of highlight features. On the back they highlight more features and include a blurb about playing the Vista way. Sapphire has always been good about including the system requirements and what connections are available on the graphics card which are on the left side of the package for easy checking, which is quite usual.

Sapphire has chosen to go with a blue colored PCB instead of the usual red that we see on most ATI based graphics cards. This is a single slot card which makes it perfect for a media server or home theater PC. There is a single slot fan used to cool the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 which covers about half of the card. This is a smaller size card in length so you will have plenty of room to work around it installed in your system. This is a PCI Express video card and uses the newer 2.0 interface for increased bandwidth. The Radeon HD 4650 gets all of the power it needs from the PCI Express slot so there is no external power needed.

To overclock the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 we chose to use the ATI Overdrive utility. We started off raising the GPU clocks 5MHz at a time until the system became unstable and then backed down 1MHz at a time until stability returned. We did the same thing for the memory speeds to achieve optimum results. We were able to push the GPU to 690MHz stable which might not seem very high for an overclock but remember this card is pre-clocked from the factory already so this is about where it is expected to be. The memory maxed out at the rated 2000MHz for the type of Hynix memory used. And one thing of note we want to mention is we were able to push the memory beyond 2000MHz using ATITool.

While the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 is not meant to be a high end gaming card it did score well at lower resolutions when running our benchmarks which are mostly on medium to high settings. Most games had given decent playable frame rates which is fine for the casual gamer wanting to break the everyday monotony. During many of the tests the Radeon HD 4650 scored very closely to the Radeon HD 4670 which uses the same RV730 clocked 100MHz higher. Given the slot size and price tag this card would be ideal for anyone putting together a media server, home theater PC or even a workstation for gaming.

The performance per price factor makes the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 a steal. Since this card is overclocked by the factory we did not expect much headroom however we were able to push the memory to its limit. While the scores through out the article were the lowest it still gave the Radeon HD 4670 a run for its money which costs more. During operation the card stayed quite cool even when overclocked. Not once did we hear a wind tunnel coming from my computer. Overall this is a very nice card and will give you performance you need without hurting your finances in this tough economy.