So you want to be a rock star? Well just like the stones say, you can't always get what you want. Some of us realize we are just normal people and must settle for our daily mundane tasks and push on day after day. The same holds true for computer graphics cards, or does it? Today we will look at a mainstream card with a bit of an identity problem, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 graphics card. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 has been around for some months now, but until recently only available with GDDR3 memory. The addition of GDDR4 memory is not a game maker or breaker but should result in the very least a measurable boost of performance over its GDDR3 brethren. - Benchmark Reviews

Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 Video Card Review

Now with its 320 stream processors and carrying 512MB of GDDR4 memory the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 edition is now the best product in its class. Clock speeds are 750MHz for the core and 2200MHz effective for the memory making this the fastest Radeon HD 4670 card available. The card is cooled by a new large diameter fan based cooler which keeps noise levels to the minimum. The box is done in typical ATI fashion with black and red. Sapphire does their norm with a scantily clad woman on the cover ready to do battle of one sort or another. The box art is almost identical to Sapphire's other mainstream cards.

Thankfully, the box is bigger and arranged horizontally compared to the GDDR3 models vertical box but again they do share the same artwork so be sure of what you are buying if you pick one of these up. The heart of the beast is the RV730 core and comes with 320 unified shaders on die with 55nm fabrication process. It offers DirectX 10.1 support and a factory default speed of 750MHz. Some years ago Hynix made a push to become also a player in the GDDR4 arena. It seems they've made it. The memory of choice on the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 is Hynix rated at 2400MHz on a mainstream 128-bit memory interface bus.

Sapphire is ATI's premiere partner and they follow ATI's lead with artwork, but with thier unique spin. Sapphire does a good job and their marketing is never too dull or never too over the top. Their boxes are always easily recognizable and they have very good brand recognition. We do think it may be time for them to give the women warriors a break and come up with something fresh though. We're asked to rate the appearance of the product which can be very subjective, afterall beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. We think in this case the simplicity of design and cleanliness of the heatsink application on the card is hard to argue.

This card runs solid. We put up a good fight against some stiff competition and faired well given that competition. However as we've stated above the pricing structure currently on the Radeon HD 4600 line we're afraid this card may price itself right out of contention. With this being the top of the Radeon HD 4670 line pricing should be above the normal $80-90 mark. This saddens us just a little because this is a really great little card. It's price redeeming factors may very well be the silent and cool operation coupled with low power consumption and excellent HDMI options. The value mark for this card is tough to put a point on.