Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 & HD 4830

[Rob Williams]

Gaming on a budget isn't as difficult as it once was, thanks to superb offerings from both ATI and NVIDIA that go for a modest price. But, what about the sub-$100 crowd? We'll find that out here, at least from the ATI side of things, with Sapphire's HD 4670 GDDR4 and HD 4830. Both feature great efficiency, and believe it or not, great overclocking as well.

After reading the full article here, feel free to discuss it here!

Before someone says it, yes, we're lacking results for cards more aligned with the cards reviewed here. Due to time constraints, we were unable to re-benchmark certain GPUs (HD 4850/4870) using our latest testing suite. Both of the cards in the article are in a league of their own though, and comparisons to higher-end GPUs isn't that necessary.

 

[Doomsday]

aww man, i was hoping u would put these guys against the Nvidia 9600GT/GSO or the 9500GT.

i wonder wen Nvidia will come to GDDR4 or GDDR5

 

[Rob Williams]

There just wasn't time to test those cards, but to be honest, the 9600 GT ranks above the 9600 GSO, and from what I saw around the web in other articles, the HD 4830 beats out the 9600 GT in every test. You could use that as a baseline. I look forward to being able to get caught up around here so I can get back to benchmarking the rest of our line-up.

 

[professor X]

Where do I begin?

Very poorly constructed article. By choosing only high end comparison cards you have completely skewed the graphs with irrelevant data, particularly for an article emphasizing budget cards. You should have included the 9600 gt/ gso(96 and 46 processor variants) and possibly 9800gt and ati 3870. And no, looking at other websites is not an acceptable alternative since their test conditions will differ.

Speaking of the graphs, Yikes! Drop the 4850 x2 since it is just wasting space. You might also want to overlay the min on the avg bars to reduce the size or use the additional space to justify your usable recommendation (which is a more important piece of information given the stated scope of the article).

The "overclocking" section should have been dropped entirely since it essentially was not attempted. Possibly due to the time wasted testing the too expensive boards.

Grade: epic "F"

 

[Rob Williams]

Hi professor X:

As I mentioned in the first post to this thread, due to the complete lack of time I've had recently, I was unable to go back and re-test comparative NVIDIA cards for the sake of adding them to our graphs. This is something I regret, but I've been working towards getting dug out of this huge queue for a while now and needed to do what was possible to get it done.

In addition, I mentioned that comparisons weren't truly needed due to the fact that these cards are in a class of their own (they are the only sub-$100) GPUs we have here, or so I thought. I didn't realize the 9600 GSO was so inexpensive now, so if there is one card I wish I would have tested, it would be that one. As I mentioned, time has been really tight lately, and my main goal is to get caught up with the workload here.

As for the HD 4850 X2, that was left in because the performance was representative of what I experienced when I last tested it. I'm not sure what it is, but I've had bad luck with ATI dual-GPU cards on Intel Core i7 platforms. At quick glance, even the 9.2 driver didn't fix this. Once I'm able to get the time (which I'm hoping will be very soon), I'll be revisiting this issue.

The "overclocking" section should have been dropped entirely since it essentially was not attempted. Possibly due to the time wasted testing the too expensive boards.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Despite the lack of time, I did spend time on overclocking (it's not difficult when the Core clock can only go so high, and the stress tests take time). After I found the top clocks for both cards, I stress-tested using OCCT 3.0 and also went ahead with game testing, and ran into no issues. I was very impressed by the overclocking-ability shown here, so to say it "was not attempted" is rather absurd.

Either way, your rant is a little frustrating. You don't mention about how we have some of the best-written content on the web, or how we manually benchmark each and every game without the use of timedemos. That really doesn't matter though, I guess. We can only do so much here.

Stay tuned for future GPU content, when I'll be able to fill the graphs out a lot more. I do apologize for not having more comparison, but as I said, things have been rough around here where time is concerned.

 

[Jozza]

Why you didn't use Riva Tuner to overclock 4670 GDDR4? CCC has implemented AOD but it can OC core clock only to a modest 800MHz, but I that this 4670 GDDR4 has an exelent cooling solution, so 800+MHz isn't a problem to it's core.

 

[Rob Williams]

Hi Jozza:

I've been told that RivaTuner allows ATI overclocking, but anytime I've ever installed it, I've never found the option to do so. With NVIDIA cards, it's very straight-forward, but with ATI, it must not be. It seems like it would be a hassle most people wouldn't want to deal with. At least I don't (if it involves simply editing registry entries and the like).

ATI should just start allowing higher clocks with their Control Center... it makes no sense for them to severely limit it like they do.