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.

Here are the full technical specs on the 4650. The main difference between this and the 4550 is a reduction in stream processors from 320 for the 4600 series to 80 for the 4500. A fairly sharp decline.

514 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 memory interface (depending on model)
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
320 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 128 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for superior quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform1
2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)
Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)
Hardware MPEG-1 and DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and IDCT
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor1
Enhanced DVD up-conversion to HD
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
Full score in HQV (SD) and HQV (HD) video quality benchmarks
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated DVI display outputs
Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
decondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)2
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
DisplayPort™ output support
Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 KHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution4
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 KHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution4
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™ Technology5
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology6
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance bridge interconnect
 

Here we see the overclocked 4650 nearly tied with the standard Radeon 4670 in Crysis. The Sapphire 4550 also sees a slight bump with the increase in memory clockspeed. The 9500 GT fits somewhere in between the video card classes. As we can see the 4500 isn't quite able to handle DX10 medium settings on Crysis. It wouldn't be very playable at 18.5 fps but the 4600 cards don't have any problem.

Unreal Tournament 3 is much less of a graphics workhorse than Crysis and here we see all cards perform well. Again the 4600 cards are on top but we do see a slightly larger difference between the 4600 cards. Not bad though for the 4650.

In Company of Heroes we see about a 10% difference between the overclocked 4650 and the standard 4670. Sapphire's 4550 is also a few fps faster than the regular 4550. The 9500 GT appears to do much better in CoH but still not as fast as the 4600 cards.

World in Conflict seems to follow the trend we've seen so far.

Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.