Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

It is the first GPU review in a while from HWC but at the same time, this is one heck of an interesting card. The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate offers passive cooling, a low retail price and enough gaming muscle for most casual gamers.

You can find the review here: Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate 512MB Passive Video Card Review

Please use this thread to post your questions and comments.

[Cheator]

Wow, I totally need to get my hands on one of those. Great review as always!

[Skyllz]

Very impressive.

Sounds like a winner to me for any HTPC that double duties for gaming sometimes.

[SKYMTL]

It really is a great card but even after talking to Sapphire, I have yet to understand the point of using 2Ghz GDDR3 and then clocking it to ~1.7Ghz.

[lemonlime]

Great review, and a great value card!

[Supergrover]

Good review Skittles.

86c under load isnt that bad IMO, my first gen 88gt broke over 90c at load before the BIOS update and that was in a case with good airflow.

Native hdmi too FTW!

This would make a decient upgrade to my htpc since I am running a older 76gt in it.

[SKYMTL]

Considering the near-complete lack of airflowin the case, it is an impressive result to say the least.

However, I just received the new BFG 9800 GT Thermointelligence Passive which uses....a Thermalright heatsink.

[cadaveca]

will the card run the meme @ 2ghz? I could understand becuase of the heat...

Slightly slower than a 3870, but passively cooled? $113 @ newegg.ca...not a bad card at all...

[SKYMTL]

I tried a bit of overclocking last night and it was like bashing my head against a wall. The core got to something like 8Mhz above stock and I didn't get to the memory.

If I had to guess, the reason why the memory is at this speed is because they limited voltage to it in order to keep heat to a minimum.

[bojangles]

Originally Posted by SKYMTL

I tried a bit of overclocking last night and it was like bashing my head against a wall. The core got to something like 8Mhz above stock and I didn't get to the memory.

If I had to guess, the reason why the memory is at this speed is because they limited voltage to it in order to keep heat to a minimum.

Most likely. Those chips aren't covered and probably don't dissipate heat all that well. Restricting voltage is definitely a compromise that had to decide upon, but for good reason. I don't think many people would want to overclock for a silent setup, alone most people that want an HTPC probably don't know how to overclock. Because the chips are quite large, they probably transmit heat throughout the entire PCB. Again, you probably won't see much of a performance increase at higher RAM speeds.