Way back in October, I had the opportunity to review the Sapphire HD4550, and I promptly crowned it reigning champion of HTPC video cards in terms of HD content playback.  At the time, I felt it was the perfect solution for any HTPC owner, due to its awesome Blu-Ray playback, low noise, and cool operation.  Lo and behold, Sapphire has sent us a new card looking to usurp the throne.  This new card, the Sapphire Radeon HD4670 Ultimate HD, sports the RV730 core based on 55nm tech, which is largely what makes passively cooling this card possible.  On top of that, the 4670 sports 320 Stream Processors compared to the 4550's 80, which means it has some gaming potential as well.  So, will it find it's way into the hearts of HTPC owners?  Read on and find out!

Packaging and Layout:

The 4670 comes in an attractive white box with what appears to be a futuristic supermodel ninja.  She also appears to be packing a special tool belt....and I am pretty sure I don't want to find out its "special features", if you know what I mean. 

The actual card itself almost looks like a piece of work out of the portfolio of H.R. Giger.  If you compare the Ultimate HD to the reference HD 4670, you will also notice that the layout of the card has changed.  The dimensions are nearly the same, with the exception of the added space taken up by the large passive heatsink.

The way the heatsink wraps around the backside is also pretty unique in terms of design.  This doesn't actually do much to cool the back of the card, but it does effectively increase the surface area of the heatsink.  Also notice that there are no crossfire connectors, either. 

The backside shows the unique L-shaped design used to wrap the heatsink around to the back of the card.  It truly is a very different design.  If you are using an bracket in the first PCI slot, you may have some clearance issues, but most people should not have any problems. 

Here is the view of the card as you would see it once its installed.  The funny thing is, the Sapphire brand would actually be upside down in a standard case.  Since most HTPC cases are designed to be hidden away in a home theater cabinet, this is probably an irrelevant detail for most. 

The typical connector layout for the 4000 series of ATi cards usually consists of two DVI ports with a proprietary S-Video-like connection in the center.  The Ultimate HD mixes things up, however, as here we have a DVI, VGA, and onboard HDMI connector.  The upside here is that HDMI support is achieved without an adaptor, but the downside is older TV's that use S-Video/Component/Composite connectors are now left in the dust. 

Finally, we have the money shot of the GDDR3 memory, and just like the reference 4670, this card is packing chips from Hynix.  The full data sheet for the GDDR3 can be found on Hynix's site, here.  According to the specs, the N0C specification allows for 2.05V and 2GHz effective data clock.