ATI’s Radeon HD 4670 is a full-featured, compact graphics card that offers last year’s midrange performance at a very low-end price. For around $80, you can play even the latest games at medium resolutions, watch DVD and HD video, and run multiple monitors.
The HD 4670 is available with 512MB of 1,000MHz GDDR3 memory or 1GB of slower 900MHz standard DDR3 RAM; we tested the 512MB version. The faster memory will offer better performance in the resolutions at which you’re likely to play games when using this card. Interestingly, our sample card sported one dual-link DVI connector (which can be used with an HDMI adapter) and two cutting-edge DisplayPort connectors. Some card makers will ship versions with dual DVI connectors and an analog port instead.
The card draws all of its power from the PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slot and doesn’t require a separate power cable. Along with its short, 7.6-inch length, this makes it a good choice for use with compact PCs that don’t have PCIe power leads. AMD says the HD 4670 consumes less than 75 watts under full load, and it features dynamic power management to minimize power consumption when the card is idle. The single fan is almost inaudible, and the card runs much cooler than its 4800-series big brothers, idling at 43 degrees Celsius. When the GPU is stressed, though, temperatures reach 83 degrees, which might raise overall temperatures in cases with limited airflow.
The HD 4670 supports DirectX 10.1 (DX10.1), though virtually all existing games only take advantage of DX10. For a card in its price range, the HD 4670’s 3D performance is excellent; even demanding DX10 games were playable with details cranked up at 1,280x1,024 resolution. The HD 4670 scored 32 frames per second (fps) in our World in Conflict test and 40.1fps in Company of Heroes. Compare those numbers to results from the HD 3850 board released about nine months ago at about the same price, which turned in virtually unplayable scores of 9fps and 17.6fps respectively in our World in Conflict and Company of Heroes tests.
In DX9 tests, we not only got a silky-smooth 66fps in our F.E.A.R. test at 1,280x1,024, but also a very responsive 40fps at 1,920x1,200, compared to just 34fps and 15fps in the same F.E.A.R. test with the older HD 3850. The HD 4670 doubles, and in some cases more than triples, the performance of its predecessor, letting you play even the newest games in high detail at medium resolutions—not bad at all for a sub-$100 card.
You can drop up to two additional HD 4670 cards into a system that has a CrossFireX-compatible motherboard, boosting performance even further. Image quality is excellent; ATI has had 3D anti-aliasing and filtering down to an art for a couple of generations now, and the card does a great job of upscaling DVD content to your monitor’s native resolution. ATI’s Avivo HD technology enables hardware decoding of the H.264 and VC-1 compression used by HD DVD and Blu-ray. The HD 4670 has onboard 7.1-channel audio, supporting surround sound output over the HDMI or DisplayPort cable.
The ATI Radeon HD 4670 brings an unprecedented level of performance for such a low price. It’s an excellent card both for video playback and for playing even the latest games on small to midsize monitors.
Price (at time of review): $79author:Denny Atkin
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