HIS Radeon HD 4650 512MB iSilence4 review

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Installation | GPU temps | Power consumption | Noise levels

Installation

Installation of graphics cards anno 2009 is fairly standard. Graphics cards are pretty easy to install. This card was not different. Slide the card into a free PCIe 8x / 16x slot and connect a monitor.

You can now power up the PC. Once Windows boots up, install the latest Catalyst drivers and make sure your operating system is fully patched up, especially DirectX. After the Catalyst driver installation, reboot the PC and you are ready to go.

Power consumption

It's time to do some actual testing with these cards. We'll start off by showing you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is really good with the new 55nm products.

Sidenote: we recently upgraded our test-platform, which by itself utilizes a lot of energy.

It's Core i7 965 / X58 based and overclocked to 3.7 GHz. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results).

The ASUS motherboard also allows adding power phases for stability, which we enabled as well. I'd say on average we are using roughly 50 to 100 Watts more than a standard PC due to these high-end settings and then add to that the CPU overclock, water-cooling, UV lights, optical drive and HDDs. Keep that in mind.

Our normal system power consumption is higher than the average system.

  • System in IDLE = 189 Watts
  • System with GPU in FULL Stress = 249 Watts

Only 249 Watts, which is really fine.

Very interesting are the power states of the GPU and memory. It's clocked down massively in desktop mode, we spotted the core clocked at 165 MHz.

Power Supply recommendation

A single Radeon HD 4650/4670 series requires you to have a 350-400 Watt power supply unit, and I think that's on the safe side already. Recommended is 24 AMPs on the 12 volts rails for stable power distribution (combined 12V rails total). Please make note of the fact that the card does not use any 6-pin power connectors and thus feeds from the motherboard PCIe slots.

Crossfire does not really apply, as the 4650 does not have crossfire connectors. However, you could still give it a try as Crossfire might work even without the crossfire connectors. The PCIe slots should be fast enough for this. If you do so, please use a 500 Watt or better PSU.

There are many good PSUs available, over the years we reviewed a lot of them and have loads of recommended PSUs for you to check out in there, have a look. Things that can happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

  • bad 3D performance
  • crashing games
  • spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
  • freezes during gameplay
  • PSU overload can cause it to break down

Graphics processor temperatures

It's always interesting to monitor new developments, and for AMD a large problem to tackle was power consumption. In combo with the 320 shader core 4650 that is passively cooled, I did expect much higher temperatures. I'm happy to report this is not the case.

  • They brought the clock frequency down severely in 2D (desktop mode). As a result we see very nice IDLE temperatures at roughly 50 Degrees C (122 oF).
  • Once we start stressing the GPU the temperature goes up, but we stabilize at roughly 70 Degrees C (158 oF). Though a lot for this product it's still perfectly normal.

HIS RAdeon HD 4850 512MB iSilence4

Noise Levels coming from the graphics card

When graphics cards produce a lot of heat, that heat usually needs to be transported away from the hot core as fast as possible. Often you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. I'm doing a little try-out today with noise monitoring, so basically the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will start measuring how many dBA originate from the PC. Why is this subjective, you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background, from the streets, from the HD, PSU fan etc etc, so this is by a mile or two not a precise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber.

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBa level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1kHz and above 6kHz are attenuated, where as frequencies between 1kHz and 6kHz are amplified by the A weighting. 

TYPICAL SOUND LEVELS
Jet takeoff (200 feet) 120 dBA  
Construction Site 110 dBA Intolerable
Shout (5 feet) 100 dBA  
Heavy truck (50 feet) 90 dBA Very noisy
Urban street 80 dBA  
Automobile interior 70 dBA Noisy
Normal conversation (3 feet) 60 dBA  
Office, classroom 50 dBA Moderate
Living room 40 dBA  
Bedroom at night 30 dBA Quiet
Broadcast studio 20 dBA  
Rustling leaves 10 dBA Barely audible

Well, with a passively cooled design, the noise levels are obviously obsolete. No noise :)

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