Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC
System Setup:
There once was a time not too long ago where customers would often need to wait months for their new graphics card to be supported by the official ATI Linux driver, but fortunately, that is no longer the case. Since the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 earlier this year they had made an evolutionary leap in their Linux support and are now ensuring same-day Linux support for all of their new hardware. With that said, we just inserted the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC graphics card into our graphics test system with Catalyst 8.11 and it had worked as expected.
Our test system was an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocked at 4.00GHz with an ASUS P5E64 WS Professional, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, Western Digital WD1600JS-00MHB0 SATA HDD, and an OCZ EliteXStream 800W power supply. For the operating system we were using Ubuntu 8.10 (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5.2, Catalyst 8.11, and the NVIDIA 180.08 driver. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC arrives factory overclocked at 650MHz and 900MHz, which is 50MHz above the reference RV730PRO core clock and a 400MHz boost for the video memory, but that didn't stop us from pushing the graphics card even further. OverDrive on Linux allows pushing this graphics card up to 700/1000MHz, which we had no problems achieving. Running the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC at these speeds hadn't caused any problems. The graphics card remained cool during operation at both the 650/900MHz and 700/1000MHz frequencies, though the fan wasn't the quietest that we have heard. The Sapphire HD 4650 OC fan noise was still acceptable, but simply not as quiet as other fans we have encountered on similar inexpensive low-power graphics cards.
For looking at the performance of this graphics card we had used Phoronix Test Suite 1.4.2 with the Nexuiz, OpenArena, Urban Terror, World of Padman, Lightsmark, and GtkPerf tests. The graphics cards used in the comparison were a Sapphire Radeon HD 4550, Sapphire Radeon HD 4670, Sparkle GeForce 9500GT, and ASUS GeForce 9600GT. We had run the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC at its 650/900MHz stock speed and then again with the maximum 700/1000MHz speed.