Sapphire HD4670 Final Thoughts

I'd like to add some final thoughts. I've spent sometime playing a few games with this card and I've had wonderful experiences with it. It truly surprised me. For Valve games such as Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Left 4 Dead, this card will play all of them pretty much at max settings. I've played Left 4 Dead at 1920 x 1200 with all eye candy turned up and it was just a tiny bit slow. Just enough to annoy me but playable. I played a full round of versus. I don't think I would want to sustain that at such a high resolution but lower resolutions would be fine all day long. I've played Crysis at 1280 x 1024 all on high and saw frames per second from 35 to about 28. It was playable. I then went to 1024 x 768 and left the card scale the image to 1280 x 1024 with no noticable loss in image quality and saw frames from 40 to 35 - very playable. I played FarCry 2 on High settings at 1280 x 1024, again very playable. This was all done at factory clocks.

I'll be honest I was very surprised with the performance of the HD 4670 GDDR4 card. I played quite a few games with this card, but not until after I ran the benchmark tests. I was like "what? This card isn't supposed to be so much fun! What's going on here?" I love to give out positive reviews but I hate to find no faults. After all nothing is perfect. I feel I'm either not doing my job or I'm not observant enough. I'm trying very hard to find something wrong with this card, but I'm not finding much. True the HD 4670 did come in last place overall in my comparisons but given the chance I'm sure this card would stomp a mud hole in it's true competition. The card nvidia has right now to compete with the HD 4670 is the 9500GT. I honestly don't believe the 9500GT would stand a chance against this.

The only real fault I'm seeing in this card right now is price. This card can compete performance wise but to be honest if it wants to compete it has to compete fully, performance and price. As of writing I'm not seeing any prices published for this upgraded HD 4670 but the GDDR3 versions are selling from $80 to $125 on www.newegg.com with the Geforce 9600GT selling from $90 to $130. Strictly speaking on game playing muscle I just don't see the value in this card compared to say a 9600GT at basically the same price. Performance wise this card sits between the 9600GT and the 9500GT and yet sells for at least the same if not more than the higher performing 9600GT.

Given all of that, this card may be the better multi-tasker. If you are looking for a dead silent card with enough power to play most games and still take it easy on your electric bill this card may fit your ticket. If you need integrated hassle free HDMI output card with enough power to push a full 1080p TV this card could be your choice. If you are a gamer on a budget with an OEM pc with integrated graphics and no PCI-E power plug, maybe this card should be your choice.

I hope the information I've given you can help you make a better choice for your needs.

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