Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict
A lot can be said about the Radeon 4650 512MB as offered by HIS today. And depending on your preferences, wishes and requirements the opinion would change a lot. The card has a lot to offer for the money though.
We believe the HIS Radeon HD 4650 512MB iSilence4 is an okay deal. Sure, this is not a heavy metal, hardcore, uber-powered and armored gaming piece of machinery, in fact it's REAL far from that. But hey... it's not designed to be such a product, and face it, neither are you paying for it to be so. Fact is, i'd pick a 4670 over the 4650 anytime though.
Fact is also, if you restrict yourself to the lower resolutions, you will be surprised how much performance the card can still squeeze out of it's cute little RV730 graphics processor. Tweak it a little bit like we did and you'll easily whip out another 15, maybe 20% performance out of it. At ~75 USD it is just a very fair product.
Where it really shines is obviously in a normal desktop environment... and in HTPCs. If you want something really capable of decoding, accelerating and enhancing Blu-ray 1080P movies then this card is a bargain. On top of that, it comes with a passive cooling design, which is just fantastic for a silent HTPC environment. Obviously you do need to have a little airflow in your PC to get rid of that residual heat.
Pop in a Blu-ray disc and the GPU can decode and enhance the movie for you, it'll even send 8 channel sound to your receiver or HD screen.
The price is right, the game performance is fair enough for what the product is worth, the noise levels are NIL, power consumption is right, feature set is right and temperatures are in order as well.
Other than that, if 75 USD / 55 EUR is your maximum budget then there's honest to the one almighty nothing I can say to keep you from purchasing this product.
You'll absolutely respect what it does for the money, and the Zalman passive cooler tops that off. The Radeon 4650 GDDR2 512MB iSilence4 version comes recommended by Guru3D.com, but only if you are on a limited budget, and if it meets your requirements, purpose and functionality.
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