ATI has come back in ways many didn't think possible at one point for the graphic company. Although leapfrogging had long been a part of the graphics card business dominated by ATI and Nvidia since 2000 it looked quite bad for ATI with no DX10 part and then one that launched that was slow and power hungry. That was this and this is now as ATI now is on top in every single aspect with their newest 4000 series of cards. Today we'll be looking again at their latest graphics card targeted at the sub-$100 market, the Radeon HD 4670 from Sapphire.

The Radeon 4670 shares a lot in common with the other 4800 cards that have been on the market. It is built off a more efficient second generation 55nm manufacturing process, it features UVD2 HD decoding, PCI-Express 2.0 support, HDMI 7.1 audio output. The feature set is basically identical but the number of stream processors and power is more similar to the Radeon 3800 series.

320 stream processors are onboard the 4670, the same as the Radeon 3850 and 3870. The GPU is clocked at 750MHz which is 25MHz less than the 3870 with 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 1GHz (2GHz data rate) or cards with 1GB of memory at 900MHz (1.8GHz effective). This is slower than the 1.25GHz of the 3870 and the 4670 also sees a chopping of the bus bandwidth down to 128-bit compared to the 256-bit of the 3870. Still we see specs very similar to a 3870 and for an $80 card with newer features and no need for external power. Two dual-link DVI outputs are onboard as well as the standard component out.

The Sapphire card we're looking at is a standard card but Sapphire does offer a lot of value in an excellent bundle. Sapphire includes Cyberlink DVD suite, Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 for Blu-Ray playback, DVI-to-VGA adapter, HDTV dongle, and a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. Sapphire also includes what they call a RubyROM which includes demos of Call of Juarez, John Woo's Stranglehold, Dungeon Runners, the screensaver Earthsim, GameShadow, wallpapers and other screensavers. No full versions of games but a great software bundle for a card in this price range.