Back in September we looked at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 graphics board that offered 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Overall, this RV730 based graphics card had performed well under Linux and not a bad investment with it retailing for about $80. Sapphire though has now introduced a new version of the Radeon HD 4670 that sports 512MB of GDDR4 memory. This is a different approach to go for this memory type, and will provide a bit larger bandwdith. The remainder of their board design was kept as is, except for the cooling solution. Will switching out the GDDR3 for faster GDDR4 memory have much of an overall performance and gaming impact on this graphics accelerator, or rather limited? - Phonorix

Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 Card Style Preview

On the exterior of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 packaging are various graphics, lists of the different features, and other highlights that are common to Sapphire's package design. The first Radeon HD 4670 that we looked at from Sapphire had a cooler that closely followed AMD's reference design, but this is not the case with their GDDR4 version. Sapphire has installed a much larger aluminum heatsink onto their Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 model with an equally large fan. This fan though is designed to operate quietly. In addition to the GPU heatsink, there are small memory heatsinks on all of the memory chips.

The RV730 core on this graphics board is effectively the same as on the older model, built on a 55nm fabrication process with 320 stream processors and is CrossFireX compatible. Sapphire has not factory overclocked the GPU on this graphics card, which is set to run at 750MHz. The GDDR4 memory is set to run at 2200MHz, which is a 200MHz boost compared to the GDDR3 memory on the earlier version. On the back of the graphics card there are the four screws holding the large heatsink in place and then four more memory chips with heatsinks. So the memory chips are placed on both sides of the PCB of this graphics card.

When looking at the performance we must say that it doesn't bring that much added value though in intensive rendering of some games the faster memory does make a difference, but overall it doesn't stand really above the previous version. The performance is good when compared to the price, but we would have expected more from it with these high speed GDDR4 memory chips. If you want to spend a little more, and play buffer intensive games this card will do just fine.