Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition Review

ccokeman - February 18, 2009
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Testing:

Now down to what we all have been waiting for. To test the Sapphire HD4870, we will be putting it through a series of benchmarks designed to push the card to its limits. Then to compare the performace of this edition to other current cards on the market, we will place those scores against them and see where it stands. All hardware will be run at their stock speeds, timings and voltage to avoid any errors in the scores. The NVIDIA cards will be run using driver version 180.87 and the ATI cards will be running the 8.12 release of Catalyst. Due to a monitor hardware failure, we could not run the benchmarks at 2650x1600 at this time, however they will be added once the issue has been resolved, so please check back.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64bit

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire HD4670 Ultimate Edition

When it came time to overclock the Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition, I didn't know really what to expect. Is this card cool running? How effective is the cooling when it is pushed? Just how much head room will it have above the default clock speeds of 750MHz on the GPU core and 873MHz on the 512MB of Hynix GDDR3 memory? The first thing I want to say is that temperatures were never an issue with the HD 4670 Ultimate Edition. The maximum temperature I recorded on the GPU core was 58 degrees Celsius. The cooling solution does the job, and quietly at that. Unfortunately, this did not give me any luck when it came to overclocking. I was rewarded with a meagre 26 MHz over the stock clocks speeds of 750MHz at 776MHz. The memory was a little better when it came time to lean on the card and delivered, with an increase of almost 100MHz to 960MHz. The card has some legs - you just need to stretch them.