AtheK Posted September 13, 2008 Report Share Posted September 13, 2008 When AMD released its Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 the price/performance advantage over NVIDIA at the time was so great that we wondered if it would extend to other GPUs based on the same architecture. Inevitably AMD would offer cost reduced versions of the 4800 series and today we're seeing the first example of that; meet the RV730 XT, otherwise known as the Radeon HD 4670. 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. 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. AMD is also announcing (but we're not testing) the Radeon HD 4650 running at a meager 600MHz and using 500MHz DDR2 memory. The 4650 will chop another $10 off the 4670's pricetag. AMD lists board power of the 4670 and 4650 at 59W and 48W respectively and obviously they're single slot (with no PCIe power required). To make things better, both of them include the same 8-channel LPCM support for HDMI from the 4800 series. We're waiting to sort out some issues with HDCP and our latest test version of PowerDVD Ultra before confirming the support, but we know first hand that it works on the 4800 series and we see no reason that it wouldn't on the 4600 series. We are quite happy to see AMD pushing it's latest generation technology out across its entire product line. It's great to see new parts making their way into the market rather than a bunch of old cards with slight tweaks and new names. Of course, AMD is fighting back from a disadvantage, so they don't have the luxury of relying on their previous generation hardware to trickle down the same way NVIDIA can. But we certainly hope that AMD continues to follow this sort of trend, as the past couple years have been very hard on the lower end of the spectrum with a huge lag between the introduction of a new architecture and its availability in the mainstream market. Also of interest is the fact that AMD has added support in the RV730 for 900 MHz DDR3. The move away from GDDR3 toward the currently ramping up and dropping in price system memory solution is quite cool. Let's take a look at that in a little more depth. Read here: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3405&p=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aman27deep Posted September 13, 2008 Report Share Posted September 13, 2008 3 days late to start this. Because of HD 4670 and HD 4650 Nvidia falls the price of 9500 GT, 9600 GSO and 9600 GT. 9500 GT costs $69 now - the same like HD 4650. 9600 GSO is as expensive as HD 4670 and so costs $79. 9600 GT is sold for $99 now. http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=2388 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtheK Posted September 13, 2008 Author Report Share Posted September 13, 2008 3 days late to start this.http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=2388 i was waiting for you to start it since you dint i had to finally Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
utkarsh86 Posted December 18, 2008 Report Share Posted December 18, 2008 I feel compared to the 9600 gso this one is better for movies it lags behind in the gamin department but the price more than makes up for it specially for budget guys... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john117 Posted December 19, 2008 Report Share Posted December 19, 2008 @Athek: Looks like you have forgotten to take your pills .. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ImpatientSoul Posted January 25, 2009 Report Share Posted January 25, 2009 I got it for 5k one month back and it's seriously a bang for the buck. However, I do feel that it could use some good driver support. I completed Far Cry 2 on my 8600GT easily with medium settings and 4670 can't run it properly at high -- too much frame drops in between. The temperature is also quite low, much lower idle temp. that my 8600GT. I guess coz it down-clocks itself when not in heavy use. It's a perfect buy for guys looking for a card in 5k AND with a local PSU. If you do have a good PSU, I'd suggest 9600GT over it any day. It's slightly costly but worths it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
devil_angel Posted January 28, 2009 Report Share Posted January 28, 2009 5k? did u get saphire? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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