Closer Look: Sapphire HD4670

The box is done in typical ATi fashion with black and red. Sapphire does their norm with a scantily clad woman on the cover ready to do battle of one sort or another. The box art is almost identical to Sapphire's other HD 4670 cards with two exceptions. A sticker with "Ultra SilentCooler" and the bottom half of the red/silver oval states "GDDR4". Thankfully, the box is bigger and arranged horizontally compared to the GDDR3 models vertical box but again they do share the same artwork so be sure of what you are buying if you pick one of these up.

Inside the box you'll find the HD 4670 VGA card, a generous user manual with several languages, one Crossfire bridge, a Sapphire case badge sticker and four CD/DVDs. One being a VGA driver disc, two being Cyberlink DVD Suite and PowerDVD and the last being Ruby Rom volume 1.1.

Now the first 3 discs are pretty self explanatory, but new to me is the Ruby Rom. Intrigued by this disc I opened it and placed it in my DVD ROM drive before even touching the card! On it is three full games: Call of Juarez, Dungeon Runners, and John Woo Presents: Stranglehold. Now Dungeon Runners is a free game available via download, but hey the other two are actual games I've heard of. There are a couple other apps and some screen savers and wallpapers based on the included games.

The games are not a deal maker or breaker for most but for gamers on a budget free games are AWESOME!

Here you can see the card itself is not nearly as long as some of the more recent higher end cards released by both camps, this one measures only approximately 6.5". That is at least 3 inches shorter than even the smaller non reference design 9800GTX+ cards. This will help those users that can't fit the monster sized cards in their case. On top is a simple all aluminum heat sink and large 80mm fan encased in a molded shroud. The plastic shroud snaps onto the heat sink with no screws required. Not so much the shroud, but that fan looks familiar to me...

From the top you can again see the size of the heat sink/fan combination. It covers roughly 3/4 the length of the card. Notice how the heat sink extends up and out from the core to cover most components on the board. Depending on the rpm, this fan should be very quiet, it almost seems like overkill on a card of this type and looks just a bit out of place.

There are four RAM chips on the rear of the card. Each one is covered with a blue anodized aluminum heat sink. The blue anodization serves two purposes; for the gamer, it adds bling, for the scientist it adds protection against oxidation. At the top of the card you can see the Crossfire connectors. Gone is the typical ATi spring steel x-brace to hold the heat sink on. In it's place are four spring loaded screws. Make up our minds already! While I feel the x-brace typical of so many ATi cards does make for better pressure heat sink to core and should offer better heat transfer; if the screws work so be it. I like the aesthetics of the screws much better. The screws also offer less chance of damage or shorting on the backside of the card as well as cutting production time.

That's a quick look at the main layout and design of the card. The next section will take a closer look at some individual parts of the card.

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