ATI Radeon HD 4670 review
So then dudes and dudettes, you'll agree with me that AMD's ATI division is certainly on a roll lately. Today we are testing their new entry level product, which quite honestly performs at pretty reasonable mid-range performance and carries a stack load of features.
See it's like this, AMD took a couple of punches over the last year and a half, and really you can see them getting back on their feet. The processor market is slowly gaining it's confidence thanks to the latest Phenom processors, their chipset market is growing and ever since the release of the 4800 series product, the ATI subdivision have very large smiles on their faces, and they have the intention to keep it that way. The 4800 graphics card series is however not where the biggest chunk of money is to be made for AMD. Sub 100 USD products, that's where a lot of money is made as you can save a lot of money on components and design yet make good margins and volume in that segment. So to date there have been plenty of choices in that segment products wise, but never something really interesting from a price performance point of view for the casual gamers. And today AMD is trying to 'capture that flag' as well with the release of the Radeon 4600 series.
As stated the Radeon HD 4680 will roughly offer you last year's mid-range performance at 79 USD. With that amount of performance the card will allow you to flick on 4xAA and 16AF and still play modern games at 1280x1024 and maybe even 1600x1200. And for you as a gamer on a budget, is an immensely interesting fact for your feature and framerate budget.
Today we'll show all about that polite performing product called Radeon HD 4670 .. and why am I thrilled in the opening of this review already you ask ? Again, this product sells for 79 USD - and that is roughly 60 EUR. It's a steal ...
Guru3D
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Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 in Crossfire
Introduction
This might sound a bit slack, but when continuously hearing so much information of what's coming, I've literally come to the point where I no longer listen to it or process it in my head until the product is in my hot little hands.
While I had heard about the HD 4670 for a while and that it was going to be a 9500 GT DDR3 killer, I as usual didn't really process it all until just the other day when the card arrived.
What we need to find out today is how the card performs, what it offers and also what happens when we put two of these $79 USD cards together. Before we get stuck into all that, though, let's have a look at the package Sapphire has put together.
TweakTown
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Radeon HD 4670 buries 9500GT
Review: Crysis with no power connectors
The latest AMD strategy consisted of first conquering the performance market in order togain some long-lost trust in ATI's graphics cards, and since they did it with HD 4800, they moved on to the next one. Thanks to a dual GPU card known as Radeon HD 4870 X2, ATI succeeded Nvidia on the performance throne. Now all that's left are midrange and low end markets, the markets that yield the greatest profits for both companies. Sub-€100 range is currently a mess, and if you haven't done your research you'll be quite dazed and confused.
Today, AMD announced Radeon HD 4670, but this month will see another two products from HD 4600 and HD 4500 series. The latter card planned for low-end range is based on RV710, whereas the other one is, just like today's HD 4670, based on RV730 and will go to mid-range. All three cards are based on 55nm cores 2nd generation, and their main advantage is low consumption and no need for additional power. These PCIe 2.0 cards come with DX 10.1 support, thanks to a core that's a crippled version of RV770 architecture (HD 4800 series). Of course, we expect some decent gaming with the upcoming DX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 supporting games. UVD 2 engine and Realtek's HD Audio 7.1 (integrated into the GPU silicone) are responsible for quality HD reproduction and processing capabilities.
When it comes to mid-low end segments, the price is surely an important factor and ATI claims HD 4670 should be available at €55. At this price this card is definitely a bargain, although a couple of listed HD 4670 cards were priced at unacceptable €70.
Radeon HD 4670 is based on the RV730 core manufactured by TSMC in 55nm. It packs 320 stream processors,8 ROPs and 32 texture units. We already mentioned that RV730 is a weaker and cheaper version of RV770 architecture, and although it's cooler, it's nowhere as powerful. As far as Radeon HD 4670's features go, you'll find that they're identical to those of much pricier HD 4800 generation. Even with filters on, you should still be able to play games at 1280x1024, and maybe even higher but with filters off, of course. Just like the rest of HD 4xxx series, this card supports CrossFireX multi-GPU technology.
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Fudzilla
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The Radeon HD 4670 is priced at $79, which in the past hasn't really gotten you a very good gaming experience regardless of who made the chip. Today's launch is pretty interesting because the 4670 has the same number of stream processors as the Radeon HD 3870 (320), which at the time of its launch was reasonably competitive in the $180 - $200 range. Let's have a closer look at the 4670's specs: Clock speeds are a bit lower and we've got much less memory bandwidth, but the hardware has some advantages. The RV730 XT is a derivative of the GPU in the 4800 series cards, and it carries over some of the benefits we saw inherent in the architecture changes. Of these, antialiasing saw a major benefit, but we also see changes like increases in cache sizes, texturing power, and z/stencil ability. We won't see performance on par with the 3870 in general, but the 4670 will do some damage in certain situations, especially if AA comes into play.
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The card gives an amazing power/performance ratio! Uses even less energy than the 9500gt! :shock:
edit: AnandTech review added!
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