The 4850 and 4870 hit the market with a huge bang this past summer forcing Nvidia to drastically cut prices and at last giving ATI a better card in technology and in performance. In aiming for the upper-mid range rather than trying to build the fastest card possible they also have a great architecture to scale down from. We've looked at a few of these cards and today we have two more from Sapphire, their Radeon HD 4650 Overclock and their low-profile Radeon HD 4550.

Comparatively there isn't a huge difference between AMD's Radeon HD 4670 and the Radeon HD 4650 in their specs. Both offer 320 stream processors, 128-bit memory interfaces but there is a difference in clock speed. The other major difference is that while any of the cards can offer DDR3/GDDR2/GDDR3 all the 4670's seem to offer GDDR3 and most 4550's are GDDR2. Sapphire went with  GDDR3 though on their Radeon HD 4650 and also overclocked the card which makes the card quite comparable to a Radeon 4670. Their 4650 features a GPU core clock of 650MHz and 900MHz for the GDDR3 memory which is 100MHz less than a 4670 for the GPU core and 100MHz less for the memory. Not too far off and as you'll see in the benchmarks performance isn't either.
 

We also have another 4000 series card to look at from Sapphire, the more budget-minded Radeon HD 4550.

This card is low-profile and features 512MB of DDR3. It also seems to have a bit of a stock overclock though we don't see that mentioned on the box. The GPU core remains at 600MHz which is standard for 4550's but the memory is at 900MHz above the 800MHz of a standard 4550.

We'll see how much power Sapphire can pack into a low-profile card shortly.

Both cards come with a simple bundle as is usual for cards in their marke with a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, DVI-to-VGA adapter, case sticker, component out, and SD video output.

Both of these cards offer the wonderful features of the 4000 series from ATI with DX 10.1 suppoort, UVD2 for H.254 decoding, send-gen 55nm manufacturing process for low power consumption, and 7.1 audio output over HDMI. We've been through a number 4000 series of cards so that's a quick recap for you in case you've missed it.