Thursday, January 15th 2009
Sapphire Intros GDDR4 Memory-Equipped Radeon HD 4670
The Radeon HD 4670 graphics processor made itself some place in the sub-$100 graphics market. AMD's partners maintained profitability as the production costs of this accelerator remained low. Its opponent, the GeForce 9600 GSO, though available in its price-range makes it difficult for its manufacturers to sell at low price-points owing to it being based on the G92 graphics processor. Eventually, NVIDIA found a way around with releasing the GeForce 9600 GSO+ SKU, where the G94 GPU with reduced shader core count was employed. This made sure NVIDIA's partners brought in aggressive pricing to counter the Radeon HD 4670.
Sapphire on its part, put innovation to the table and attempted to spice-up the specifications sheets using the "GDDR4" moniker. The company released the first Radeon HD 4670 accelerator that uses 512 MB of GDDR4 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. The new graphics card features a shorter than usual PCB. It uses a central aluminum-based GPU cooler, with memory chips being cooled by heatsinks. The GPU is clocked at 750 MHz, with the memory clocked at 2200 MHz, a 200 MHz increment over the reference specs. It provides outputs in the form of a D-Sub, a DVI and a HDMI connector. It is priced as low as 75€.
Source:
TechConnect Magazine
Sapphire on its part, put innovation to the table and attempted to spice-up the specifications sheets using the "GDDR4" moniker. The company released the first Radeon HD 4670 accelerator that uses 512 MB of GDDR4 memory across a 128-bit memory bus. The new graphics card features a shorter than usual PCB. It uses a central aluminum-based GPU cooler, with memory chips being cooled by heatsinks. The GPU is clocked at 750 MHz, with the memory clocked at 2200 MHz, a 200 MHz increment over the reference specs. It provides outputs in the form of a D-Sub, a DVI and a HDMI connector. It is priced as low as 75€.
21 Comments on Sapphire Intros GDDR4 Memory-Equipped Radeon HD 4670
the gddr4 wont help at all now if itmwas gddr4 3000 mhz now that would help . low quality gddr4 wont help at all , your better off sticking to hq gddr3. i may be wrong though.
Edit:
You can see the memory bandwidth comparison between GDD5/4/3 here. The Bandwidth for GDDR4 should be much higher if it was like GDDR5. AFAIK, GDDR5 is the first QDR RAM to be used on graphics cards, which makes me wonder why it is still called GDDR, shouldn't it be GQDR?
just seen this BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX
* Memory: 1024MB (1GB) GDDR3
* Core Clock: 702MHz (vs. 648MHz standard)
* Shader Clock: 1584MHz (vs. 1476MHz standard)
* Memory Data Rate: 2664MHz (vs. 2484MHz standard)
* Processor Cores: 240
and thats gddr 3
The addition of GDDR4 is most likely to allow slightly higher clocks vs. the GDDR3. The extra 100MHz(200 Effective) actually gives about a 10% boost in memory bandwidth. Something the mid-range cards with 128-bit memory buses definitely benefit from.
I beleive not only does it allow for higher clock rates but also better latency.
@roadie
That really depends on your point of view. I mean, if you can get the card and get some really really good clocks from it, this may be the ultimate midrange card killer. I know it's spec'ed at 1100(2200 effective) but most GDDR4 can get up to 1300(2600 effective).
The GDDR4 memory will help fairly minimally, cost/per % may very well be higher than its worth also... Maybe not, kinda depends on the release cost, but honestly if they jack the cost anymore you may as well pickup a 4830...