The gaming industry is a competitive market these days. Everyone has to have the latest thing to keep up with the demanding, hardware sucking games that are being churned out every day with little hesitation. And the video card makers are making a killing off of us. Not just a killing, a freaking massacre. Sure, you can pay under $200 for a card and play the game. You could do that. But not if you want any kind of detail in any form or splendor. How the Hell am I supposed to play Fallout 3 on a card that barely handles an emulated Mario 64? Give me clarity or give yourself death, you corporate jerkoffs.
And then, along comes ATI. Or is it AMD? No, it’s still ATI, I guess. Anyway. Along they come and attempt to save us penny pinchers a few bucks. And you know what? Every now and then they create a card that just possibly could do the job without the distinct sound of a snicker coming from under the heatsink. You’ll find that with the really expensive cards, it comes standard.
So ATI tosses us a new card. One that costs hundreds less than most and manages to create stunning visual displays without the hefty price tag. And today, that card is the Radeon HD 4670. The new SAPPHIRE HD 4670 GDDR4 has been production engineered by SAPPHIRE to bring new levels of performance to the mainstream previously associated only with high end cards. With its 320 stream processors and carrying 512MB of GDDR4 memory the SAPPHIRE HD 4670 GDDR4 is now the best product in its class. Clock speeds are 750MHz for the core and 1100MHz (2.2GHz effective) for the memory making this the fastest HD 4670 card available. The card is cooled by a new large diameter fan based cooler which keeps noise levels to the minimum (<20dBA).
In the box, I received the card itself. Obviously. I also got the Crossfire cable, User Manual, as well as a driver disc, a copy of the PowerDVD Suite and the Ruby Rom with plenty of games to try your new card out with. Jeez, they make sure you get some swag with this one. I remember my first gaming card was an Nvidia GeForce 5500FX, and it didn’t even have the damned driver disc in there. Talk about a crappy day in my house.
In their latest line of HD video cards, ATI has done away with the old DDR3 RAM and has upgraded to the latest and greatest, DDR4. The end result is a higher clock speed and more powerful gaming performance. The old standard heatsink and fan has been tossed and replaced with a lower profile, quieter version that is seemingly silent even with the side of the case off. The technology powering this affordable beast is a spin-off of the core that debuted in the RV770 architecture when the 4800 Series hit the shelves. The 4670’s architecture, known as RV730, consists of 514 million transistors manufactured on a 55 nanometre process and packed into 146mm squared die. Pardon my french, but that is f$#@in’ small.
The original RV770 architecture had 956 million transistors manufactured in the same process on the same die. But by using the same process, ATI managed to make the offspring of the RV770 nearly as powerful as its forefather, capable of supporting Shader Model 4.1 and DirectX 10, making it a prime runner for a Vista-equipped machine. With the upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4, the clock speed was increased from 1000Mhz to 1100Mhz. To help keep things cool, Saphire threw on a custom job that is much more efficient and a heck of a lot quieter than the original cooling setup.
The layout of the card is pretty standard. On the top of the card are two Crossfire connectors, meaning that you can easily upgrade your gaming performance by using any ATI video card within the same chipset range. The card has 512MB of Hynix HY5FS123345A DDR4 memory. There are four chips on the front of the card, and four memory chips on the back of the card, for a total of eight. Six of the memory chips have anodized blue heatsinks applied to them, and the two above the GPU are not, due to heatsink clearance issues. Hopefully that means that these RAM chips don’t get hot enough to warrant a heatsink. The heatsink is secured with four standard screws that are spring-loaded to provide proper pressure.
The back of the video card has more than enough standard connections to keep you happy. There is one of each type of video port: a standard VGA connector, DVI connector, and HDMI connector. Previous ATI-based cards support audio over the DVI port, but you had to use a large DVI-to-HDMI adapter to support it. With the inclusion of a true HDMI port, you can just plug this baby directly t your TV and you’re good to go.
Now, I’m not one to applaud video cards unless they come with a free lap dance, but for under $90.00, I am pretty impressed with the goodies this one offers. Designed to work with Vista, PCIe 2.0 compatible, and the latest shader support with plenty of RAM to back it up? Not to mention an increased clock speed and custom cooling? I’m certainly willing to give ATI the benefit of the doubt long enough to test it. And test it I shall.
Okay, so we got that technical crap out of the way. It’s time to play some games. I am going to test the abilities of the HD 4670 on Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, as well as Rise of the Argonauts. Then I will do a little technical goofing for the sake of proof so you wankers don’t try to call BS. See? I think ahead of the curve. Because I see all of you standing there with baseball bats and railroad spikes.But first, here are the goods on my test machine:
- ECS-USA GeForce 6100PM-M2 motherboard
- Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor (overclocked to 2.2Ghz)
- 2GB Samsung 800Mhz RAM
- 320GB Baraccuda HDD SATA
- Microsoft Vista Ultimate SP1 (32-bit)
- DirectX 10
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To begin, I’m going to boot up a healthy dose of L4D and see what this bitch is capable of. During the load screens, using FRAPS, I was getting a frame rate of less than 10, which is normal for a load screen. I never seem to control the feeling of dread when I see low fps, however. My fears were soon relieved when I saw a near constant 60fps with all settings on High at 1028×786. Crystal clear picture with no chop whatsoever. ATI is slowly making me a believer, but they are going to have to try harder. Valve’s Source Engine allows most cards to play very well. Up next, I am going to test out Rise of the Argonauts.
On my motherboard’s onboard video, I was able to play Left 4 Dead at its lowest settings. That was running 128Mb of shared video RAM. But when I tried to play ROTA, I could barely make it through the load screen. I quit soon after, when it took too long to try and position my cursor over the options menus due to the low frame rate. Hopefully, the 4670 will do a better job.
Onboard was easily trumped (as if there was a surprise in store there..) by the Radeon right away on the main menu screen. A beautiful view of Iolcus from the air, birds flying by, clouds whisping along lazily. It was beautiful. And it was actually moving instead of skipping along like a scratched DVD. The gameplay was nice too, dipping no lower than 30fps with a resolution of 1028×786. The only problem with ROTA is that the game auto-adjusts to your video card and doesn’t give you any options to play around with. So, with a bowed head, I give you what the game had to offer, which wasn’t all that bad and was very playable. Lows of 30 and Highs of 60 beats the hell out of 6FPS any day of the week.
I am going to attempt to play Fallout 3. I am brand new to this game, as my gaming experience for some reason never lead me to either of the previous Fallouts. So this is also my virgin experience with any of the Fallout games. Might as well make it happen during test time right? Maybe I’ll kick ass and look good in front of all you people on my first try. Yeah, and maybe Obama will replace “Hail to the Chief” with “We takin’ over”. What? I thought it was funny. That’s what I would do. You pasty white folk have it coming’ and you know it.
I was able to play Fallout without a problem using a 1280×720 resolution and on Medium settings. I tried going for the highest settings, but found the gameplay wanting and a bit choppy. It got decidedly more so during scenes that had a lot of shadows and entities around me. However, I did manage to keep a frame rate above 25fps on high settings, and 40-60fps when on medium settings.
Lastly, I decided to benchmark the video card using two different programs that are near and dear to my heart. Using SiSoftware Sandra, I compared the 4670 against three other video cards on the market, including the Nvidia 9500. Along with the other two cards, the 4670 came very close to the results of the 9500, with a mere margin of difference between each of them. The 4670’s bandwith was rated at around 3.9GBs when connected to a PCI-express 2.0 x16 enabled motherboard. For the average/above average gamer, that is more than enough power to knock around a few bad guys in a desolate post-nuclear world.
Overall comparison, I found that the 4670 was able to contend and sometimes overpower the GeForce cards with little effort. Except for the Radeon 4870 X2, which whipped ass on every turn and was way beyond these other cards. It appears that the next level of performance is ATI’s 4830, which doesn’t cost that much more. Way to go, ATI. This should give you a spectrum of comparison on the 4670’s standing in the video card world. This is a very impressive card for the buck to say the least.
Using 3Dmark’s extensive benchmarking process, I got a score of 3187. This is nowhere near the score that many of the hardcore gaming machines out there get, but it is pretty efficient when it comes to the average gamer who wants to get more out of his/her machine without unloading a buttload of money in the process. Altogether, I found the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 above and beyond for the gamer on a tight budget. And with a little more memory and a faster CPU, the probability of getting much more out of this card is certainly in the cards. It all depends on what you want out of it. I can tell you this though, if you are looking for some quality, detailed gaming time with little out of pocket.. this is the card for you.
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1 Comment
i installed this card and it took over the mother board sound drivers (Realtek AC97)now no sound. Control says sound is on digital plug in rear i have no plug for that to my speakers. each time i reinstall the card same thing.