HIS HD4670 IceQ

The price is right but performance is found wanting.

With the rip-roaring success of the 4870(X2)/4850 cards, ATI is looking for another win in the market with their 4670. The budget end is where the real money is, as the sheer volume of cards means that the revenue generated is the highest.

Based on the RV730 XT core, itself a revised version of the RV770 core powering the aforementioned cards, the 4670 sports 320 stream processors. This is less than half the amount that the higher end cards have, but the memory speeds stay the same at an impressive 1000MHz (2000MHz effective). Unfortunately this is the slower GDDR3 memory, running on only a 128-bit memory bus, but anything more than this would have driven costs and price up. Since this is the IceQ version, the core has had a speed bump of 30MHz over stock, bringing it up to 780MHz.

The card’s PCB is smaller than most we’ve seen for a significant amount of time, and has 256MB of memory chips on either side. A large aluminium cooler is strapped to the core, with a large blue UV reactive fan and plastic shroud doing the actual cooling. There is no UV lighting included, which is a small letdown, but on the upside most of the heat is vented outside the case. And due to the small amount of heat generated, the fan remains rather quiet – even under load.

Benchmark results.

Unfortunately results aren’t that impressive, returning only 8.5k 3DMark06 points. Compared to the 9800GT that we reviewed in Issue 92, this is a drop of 3.5k points – for only a slightly reduced price. Keeping in mind that this card is pre-overclocked and still can’t keep up with the competition, this means that the lower end of performance is still squarely in NVIDIA’s court.

Keep an eye out for a budget graphics card roundup in an upcoming issue – we won’t say when, nor where, but it is coming!