The Sapphire 4650 is a all mainstream budget alternative to the more power hungry 4800 counterparts, also having a good value, but never the suffering the draw backs of being really cheap ass chip for the money conscious. Being built with the 4600 series sporting a small reduction to the normal RV770 core to the new RV730 core, only having a maximum core stream processors and shader units to 320, plus the core and memory frequencies are also reduced to accommodate its low price and never to stress the already smaller count of units. But there is always ups in this type of new core architecture, being much cheaper, plus a smaller form factor than they more gigantic big brothers; only using a single slot cooler and half the length of the 4870X2.
With the 4600 series only getting fraction amount of space in the case to hold a 4870 on it, plus the satisfaction that it is a single slot design for those who don’t have a great array of expansion slots. So for the specs of the sapphire 4650 being downgraded in the process, only having 514 million transistors nut still have a substantial memory size of about 512MB for most of the memory in juiced games, but only having a memory interface bandwidth of about 128-bit, just a little bit of reference here, with the much lower core and memory frequencies does means less performance, but with a much bigger memory, and also the standard offering is enough for normal game loading times and texture fillings run much smoother when generated. Tho we think that, the 4600 have a chance to run most main stream of games, but for the recent demanding games, like Crysis, you have a conditional amount of performance, lower resolution, low detail and no AAF, can make it playable if you are fine with the crappy detail. Plus the cards design is all in the ordinary, with the sapphire PCB colour and the reference cooling fan and heat-sink only handling 40 degrees in idle and 58 degrees in load, just a little gap on the cooling side but the much smaller aluminium fin and fan cannot exhaust that amount of heat efficiently and just dumping the hot air in the middle of the card which is not help cool it right down.
As for the grand evaluation of the card, we find out that the HD4650 can handle most of the 2002 to 05 games with great pixels flying in the screen, going over 50fsp in high res in ETQW and supreme commander with no AAF. Just as the Crysis annoyingly high recommendations, his can only handle 33 fsp. So we can enjoy a cheap card for around $100, if you are wishing to make a media or a low cost PC.
