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About LinkBacksRead more.Sapphire throws away the reference design and makes Radeon HD 4600-series better. Want to know why?
Read more.Sapphire throws away the reference design and makes Radeon HD 4600-series better. Want to know why?
Nice to see Sapphire boost the 4670 effectively (although why didn't we get the comparison to reference the 4650/70? That would've been more use...) - and at £75 it's probably still got enough of a gap to the £90 4830 to make it a sensible option.
Unfortunately, I don't see the use of a GDDR3 4650 @ £62 - for about the same money you can have a stock 4670, with an identical architecture but faster core and memory clocks. A GDDR3 4650 has to be under £60 to make sense; other you might as well just buy a 4670 (yes, at this end of the market I really believe that £3 (~ 5%) can make a huge difference to your saleability)...
Nice review. I just want to know why the chick on the cooler is wearing swimming googles
future water cooling option i reckonOriginally Posted by kalniel
Nice review. I just want to know why the chick on the cooler is wearing swimming googles
That 4670 is very good value, with that ram, that cooler and good power. Nice card.
True on the surface, but without a like-for-like review (i.e. against a GDDR3 4670) there's not much you can really say. So, after bemoaning the lack of one, I checked back against the previous 4670 test (a pretty-much-reference Sapphire card), carried out on the same mid-range test system, and the numbers paint an interesting picture:
Game - 4670 GDDR4 / 4670 GDDR3 / 4650 GDDR3 - at 1280 x 1024
COD4 - 50.7 / 50.2 / 38.7
COH:OF - 41.9 / 39.9 / 31.5
ET:QW - 65.8 / 64.5 / 48.2
GRID: - 48.0 / 47.0 / 35.1
Yes, that's an increase of 0.5 - 2 FPS - a *maximum* 5% - for the 15% hike in price. The GDDR3 4650 gets nowhere near a stock 4670, although it costs almost as much. Nice idea, these cards are. Good value for money? Only if you *really* like the big cooler on the 4670...
The HD 4670 GDDR4 should also be put higher in the reckoning as it features HDMI on the back - a useful feature if a competitors' package doesn't ship with the appropriate dongle.
This is what I like about Hexus - the staff actually take an interest in the member's views!
I agree that onboard HDMI is nice, and isn't as common on HD4670s as I'd like to see (ebuyer currently have an ASUS for £65 and a Gigabyte for £70 which also have this) - in fact I think the trio of D-Sub, DVI and HDMI is the ideal set of outputs for current video cards. I just feel that both of these cards are maybe £5 more expensive than their feature and performance enhancements really justify, when compared to equivalents...
firstly, yeah, you're right, Tarinder cares lots, and reviews very well. We all care lots.
Secondly you're also right about the trio of outputs being a very VERY good idea.
And tbh, everything is a bit more than people wanna paybut on the whole, if I were making a mid range PC for someone, I'd put that card in it
.
Is price everything? That's something I mused over from time to time.
I've sat on both sides of the fence and know what it's like as a consumer who craved after the latest kit but had to mind the budget, and as a reviewer/editor who needs to make judgements that are not wholly focused on price: it's a difficult job.
If we look solely on price, which seems like the best option on first glance, then it's a case of looking a bunch of trusted etailers, comparing pricing and declaring a winner. The inherent problem on 'this' side of the fence is that advocating a product with the primary weighting on price means that, as a bunch of reviewers across the net, we're driving down margins that would be better spent in quality R+D.
Should Sapphire sell a card in to Scan for £49 then Force3D, XFX, GeCube, HIS, et al, are all forced to compete with that. Perhaps they undercut it by 50p, then someone chops another 50p off. The point I'm getting to, I suppose, is that price is important, of course, but I'm more than happy to see a partner stick their neck out and sell a product which has some real thought behind it.
So, yes, you can buy a cheaper HD 4670 512MB and price is very important, and sometimes I wish that partners and etailers would be far more sensible about pre-order costs, but I feel the HD 4670 GDDR4 is set at a reasonable level, considering how much work has gone into it.
BTW, I'm not having a go, not at all, but the magazines started the trend of how-much-can-you-put-into-this-PC-for-£499 game, and, somewhat indirectly, the cheapening of products led to a bunch of SIs going under.
I'd like an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 for £50, but if we all had one there would be no space for innovation, and the asking price should always take that into account in the field that we love so much.
Have to disagree there. Having dual DVI (both of which an provide both the analogue VGA and digital HDMI via dongles) and TV out (with composite/s-video/component) provides a great deal more flexibility than this arrangement; that removes the TV out, and splits one of the DVI connections into seperate analogue VGA and digital HDMI connections (only one of which can be used at a time).
Is using a dongle really a downside when it affords greater flexibility?
As for the GDDR4 question, I personally don't think it's really worth paying extra for over GDDR3. Considering GDDR3 development has continued far past the stillborn GDDR4, you could easily get higher clocked GDDR3 over GDDR4 - so the use of GDDR4 seems to be a case of sapphire having some remaining GDDR4 inventory and creating products to shift it, and of course appealing to those for whom a higher number is always better.
Last edited by Michael H; 02-02-2009 at 08:54 PM.
I don't think price is everything - no. But in the lower midrange I think small shifts in price are crucially important. At, say, £72 the Sapphire GDDR4 would only be commanding half the premium over a reference Gigabyte, and with it's faster RAM and custom cooler makes a good case for being worth the extra. Or, as you said, it could have a pre-overclocked core (say, to 780MHz) which would give a larger differentiation in specs and potentially warrant the £75 price tag (all IMNSHO of course
It must be very difficult for manufacturers to gauge the market in this price range, where there's a really difficult balance to acheive between performance, features and price, and so little margin between different SKUs; and I imagine it will only get harder as more people start tightening their belts for the continuing recession. I think more and more people *will* start asking "what can I put in my box for less than (£300|£400 |£500)".
And, of course, it probably won't bother Sapphire if I don't buy this card as long as some other people do
the 9600GT is alot better then the 4670 and costs around the same, bar the fact that it needs a PCIE plug, it is more worth a buy.
Have you got a link to some tests for that? Hexus reviews only show it being 6-8% better or so.
From ebuyer right now: Cheapest 4670: £63.36; Cheapest 9600GT: £78.50
Personally, I wouldn't call that "around the same"...
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