Author : Austin Hamann -
Published : Tue, Jul 07, 2009The Budget Minded Sapphire Radeon HD 4670
Sapphire HD4670 512MB
The video card market is an ever-expanding one that sees new cards from ATI and NVIDIA alike month after month. Granted, some are just core refreshes or 're-branding,' but there is always something new. Usually cards that are released in between series updates offer a good price/performance ratio, and lower the price of main cards as well; two of those cards will be compared today. Up on the review block are the ASUS GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB and the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB.
ATI came out with the 4600 series cards some time ago; these are basically the mid-range offering, lower than the 4770 and 4800 series but above the 4300 and 4500 series. With so many new cards out there, this 4670 fits in nicely to the sub $70 market, which seems to be offering better and better performance every month. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 that we are looking at today can be purchased online for $69.99 shipped, for example.
Looking at the pictures of the cards we will be reviewing, the GeForce 9600 GSO seems a lot burlier. Though both of the cards' fans are effectively dual-slot sized, the GeForce 9600 GSO is approximately 2 1/4” longer and requires a 6 pin power connector which the Radeon HD 4670 GPU does not. Let's take a closer look at the Radeon HD 4670 video card and see if it's more powerful than it looks.
Retail Box and Bundle
Looking at the box, you can see some of the big features. It supports 7.1 channel audio (over the HDMI connection), has 512MB GDDR4 VRAM, and has an 'ultra silent' heatsink fan rated for less than 20 dBA, which is just amazing for a video card fan.
The bundle that comes with this card is a little slim, but for good reason. It doesn't supply any converters due to the variety of onboard connectors already there and it does not have the usual molex-PCIe power connector as again, none is needed since it takes its power from the PCIe slot alone. The user manual is pretty standard: how to install the card after removing an existing one, a small section for troubleshooting, and everything offered in 7 languages. The only thing that the manual, and any user manual I've seen, is missing is the driver installation and driver updating, as this is what many end-users get hung up on after all. Of the discs provided, there is the driver disc (of course) for those who want drivers they know will work. Catalyst 8.10 is what came on this disc. Another is Ruby ROM which holds three game demo's (Call of Juarez, Dungeon Runners, and John Woo Presents: Stranglehold), several high resolution wallpapers for ATI graphics (oddly, advertising the HD2000 series) and AMD Processors among others, a screensaver, and a couple of other apps. Also included in the bundle are Cyberlink's PowerDVD and DVD Suite for those who use the card as an htpc -- these discs will come in very handy. Also included in the bundle are the trademark 'Powered by Sapphire' sticker and Crossfire bridge.
A Closer Look
Measuring in at 6.56” the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 video card features 512MB of GDDR4 VRAM at 1100MHz (2200MHz effective), a 128 Bit Bus width, 750MHz on the core clock, 514M transistors and 320 Stream Processors. On paper this little thing packs some punch, and with two Crossfire interconnects, you can get a solid CrossfireX system on the cheap.
The back of the card is fairly unique in that it uses individual IC heatsinks on all the memory ICs, which is not particularly common even on most higher end cards. But anything that looks cool, doesn't get in the way, and helps with heat is fine by me.
This card offers nice variety in its display connectors, with Dual Link DVI, VGA, as well as HDMI out, so no converters are necessary for the majority of applications.
ATI has taken it upon themselves to design nearly every PCIe full-width card with two crossfire connectors for CrossfireX, whether providing two interconnects is better than one has yet to be seen, as most end-users in this price range aren't considering more than two, if that. If it isn't costing them much more money to throw that second interconnect on, why not?
With the heatsink and fan off we see the 55nm RV730XT core which produces a nice 480 GFLOPS of processing power; not bad for a card that retails for as low as $69.99.
Using GPU-Z 0.3.4, we can see all the little details about this card: from BIOS version to Driver version, to Pixel and Texture Fillrates and more. There is nothing special here so we'll move on to the test system.
The Test System
The test system was running XP Professional with Service Pack 3 and all available Microsoft updates. The Sapphire 4670 was using ATI Catalyst 9.3 drivers due to artifacting on new drivers, and the ASUS 9600 GSO was using nVidia Geforce 181.20 Cuda Drivers for the same reason. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used.
The Video Cards
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 – 512MB GDDR4 (750MHz/2200MHz)
- ASUS Geforce EN9600 GSO TOP– 384MB GDDR3 (600MHz/1800MHz)
The test system used was a little more modest than the one ordinarily used for video card reviews, featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 'Wolfdale' clocked at 3.20GHz in an EVGA 750i FTW SLI motherboard with 4GB of system memory. The Corsair XMS2 2x2GB kit was used at stock speeds of 800MHz, and 5-5-5-18 timings. The E7200 was used with a MASSCOOL 8WA741 92mm Ball CPU Cooler. Keeping in line with the rest of the system being 'budget' based, this tower cooler rings in at just $23 and keeps the chip at good temps even at a nice stable 3.2 GHz; this is an underclock compared to normal use, but rock solid. Powering the system is the Corsair TX750W Power Supply with a single 60Amp 12v+ rail.
Test Platform | ||
| Component | Brand/Model | Live Pricing
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| Processor | Intel Core2 Duo E7200
| |
| Motherboard | EVGA 750i FTW
| Click Here
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| Memory | 4GB Corsair DDR2 800MHz
| Click Here
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| Video Card
| View Above
| Click Here
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| Hard Drive
| Western Digital Raptor
| Click Here
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| Cooling | MASSCOOL 8WA741 92mm Ball | Click Here
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| Power Supply
| Corsair TX750W
| Click Here
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| Operating System
| Windows XP Professional SP3
| Click Here
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3DMark06
3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking in DX9.0. 3DMark06 tests include HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure gaming performance. Default 3DMark06 settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1280x1024 was used.
The overall score is no comparison, with the GSO outscoring the 4670 by over 2000 3DMARKs. The SM 3.0 score is slightly closer with the GSO getting 600 more points, but the SM 2.0 test has over a 1600 point difference between the two, again in the favor of the GSO. So, there is a clear winner in synthetic testing. That is the last of the testing, so now it is on to the final thoughts and conclusion.
Final Thoughts & Conclusion
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GSO with 96 stream processor that we test today are two great graphics cards that one can find in the $75 price range. To be specific, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 can be found for $69.99 plus shipping, while the ASUS GeForce 9600 GSO can be found for $73.99 shipped. At these prices you really can't complain about performance as they did fairly decent in all the games we threw at them.
For temperatures and audible sound from the fan, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 wins hands down, with idle temps of 25-30C, it runs about half as hot as the GeForce 9600 GSO which idles at higher than 55C. Additionally, the fan is hardly audible on the Radeon HD 4670 (or at least I couldn't hear it over the sound of my hard drive) unlike the GSO, which has a larger fan that you can hear over all the other fans in the system.
Performance-wise, I'm very impressed with the Radeon HD 4670 because it not only has higher frame-rates in GRiD and L4D, but it never had any issues with choppy game-play in any game. The 9600GSO may have gotten high frame rates in most games, but I can't deny the fact that the HD4670 played better in every game, whether it was running at 15fps or 70, the game play was perfect: no slide-shows, no random errors or crashes. This cannot be said for the 9600GSO, because it periodically got down to 8 fps and game-play would totally stop for up to 20 seconds at the same settings as the HD4670 was on, which ran perfect, never dipping below 45 in any situation. I would not deem the game playable at high settings on the 9600GSO; there is no getting around that. The synthetic test run, 3DMARK '06, showed the opposite performance winner, with the 9600GSO clearly in the lead, no contest, but the average user doesn't buy video cards based off synthetics alone, so take the results of that test with a grain of salt.
All in all, I'd declare Sapphire's Radeon HD 4670 512MB offering the winner as the only aspect that the 96 Stream Processor 9600GSO wins is in the synthetic benchmarking, which isn't the top priority to a majority of users. Though there is one thing that gets on my nerves, which is driver support, now both cards suffer from not being able to use the newest/beta drivers, so this doesn't really affect the comparison of the two as they tie there, it just gets annoying that the user has to hunt down the proper drivers for their card if they want an update from the driver disk version.
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