Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate 512MB Passive Video Card Review

Heat & Acoustics

We all know that the passive cooling offered by this card would all be for naught if temperatures climbed to extremes but somewhat surprisingly the Ultimate’s aluminum-fin setup proved to be an efficient heat killer. This was done on an open tech benching without much air movement other than an Antec Spotcool set to Medium placed about 9” away. These results actually impressed me considering I thought the small heatsink assembly would be simply overwhelmed by the heat from the core. I am happy to say that I was wrong and gladly give the Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate my blessings as a perfectly adequate passively cooled card. These are truly excellent results.

In a HTPC environment, silence is king and in this regard the Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate reigns supreme since you don’t need a high speed fan a-buzzin’ for it to stay cool. Altogether, Sapphire has a lot to be proud of in this regard.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.


Power consumption is well within the margin of error when compared to the stock card’s results. That being said, the HD 4670 is an extremely efficient card overall which is a definite benefit to any of those who are running this in a lower-powered HTPC.