Conclusions

While the Radeon HD 4670 in any form is never going to blaze new trails in gaming performance terms, it does offer up enough horsepower for both casual gamers and those looking to game at lower resolutions - In the vast majority of cases 1280x1024 poses no problem for this diminutive little card, and if you're willing to do without anti-aliasing or to lower in-game settings a bit then even 1680x1050 isn't out of the reach of this level of board.

Of course, Sapphire have seen fit to improve the Radeon HD 4670's design in a couple of fundamental ways to make it an even more tempting offer - The headline change is naturally the move to GDDR4, which gives this part a 100MHz memory clock boost, in turn adding a few percent to performance across the board.  While this doesn't make a huge change to the gaming capabilities of the part, extra performance is always a good thing, particularly for a mainstream part, so we certainly can't complain about the level of performance increase on offer.

Perhaps more impressive to us however is the custom cooling solution used by Sapphire on this board - This relatively large cooler may look out of place initially on such a small card, but it's simply leaps and bounds better than AMD's reference Radeon HD 4670 offering, which proved to be irritatingly noisy in our experience.  The exact opposite can be said of Sapphire's cooler here, which proves to be far, far quieter (and not even noticeable above the noise of the rest of our particular test system) as well as providing lower GPU temperatures under load and as a result increasing the overclocking potential of the core somewhat to boot.

Overall then, there's plenty to like about this "remixed" Radeon HD 4670 - This SKU also provides a decent baseline for performance at its particular price point and a well-rounded feature set to go with it, and Sapphire have expanded on that by providing faster memory, a wider range of video outputs out of the box, and a top-notch cooler.  We're still waiting on pricing information for this board, but provided it can hit a decent level then Sapphire's Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 could prove to be the cream of its particular crop.

Product information

Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 512MB

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Recommended retail pricing (at time of going to press):

Many thanks to Sapphire for providing the sample for this review

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