ATI HD 4670 512MB GDDR3 Video Card Review

Conclusion

The HD 4670 won’t win any awards for speed, it won’t be plastered on magazine’s front pages nor it will never be the poster child for a generation of high performance graphics cards. Even though will never be in the limelight, what this card sets out to accomplish, it achieves in leaps and bounds. It offers a perfect solution for everyone from system integrators and your corner mom and pop computer store since its performance is perfect for casual gamers and HD decoding while retailing for under $90. No matter which way you look at it, the most interesting aspect of the HD4670 was the fact that it was able to offer playable framerates at up to 1600 x 1200 resolution in some cases while at the same time excelling at 1280 x 1024.

ATI told us time and again that they are pointing this card in a direction which will put it neck and neck with the Nvidia 9500 GT. After seeing the benchmarks, it is hard not to laugh at that claim because the HD 4670 doesn’t compete against the budget Nvidia card, it smashes the 9500 GT’s teeth in and then knees it in the nuts for good measure. To put it bluntly, the performance of the 9500GT is a bit of an embarrassment considering its price bracket and the release of the HD 4670 has brought that fact into sharp contrast. Not only is the HD 4670 able to walk all over its “competition” in terms of performance but it also offers lower idle power consumption, better HD decoding (sorry, no VC-1 hardware decoding for the 9500 GT folks) and it still retails for less money. A more lopsided fight I have yet to see in my days as a hardware reviewer.

As with most things, all the praise for the HD 4670 512MB goes hand in hand with some good old fashioned cautionary points as well. Let’s be frank for a moment here and say that if you are looking for a budget gaming card there are quite a few other options on the market right now which provide better performance. Some of you may be reading this after the 8800 GT has gone the way of the Dodo but since it is still very much a player in the market while retailing for a mere $20 more (after MIRs) than the HD 4670. Another thing that annoys us is the fact that ATI seems to like paper launching products and this one seems to be no different. Since this review is going live after the “official” launch, we have the luxury of taking a good hard look at what kind of stock is available of these cards on launch day and unfortunately the answer to that question is “almost none”. ATI, when you launch a card take a page from Nvidia’s book and have stock in the channel, ready to be sold in quantity. If not, people may just forget about your product.

If there is anyone who will benefit from the introduction of this card it will be burgeoning HTPC market. The HD decoding capabilities of this card dwarf anything Nvidia is offering at a comparable price. It is also offering an HDMI interface and even optional DisplayPort compatibility and it all comes wrapped in one of the most compact packages we have seen in a good long time.

While it may not be King of the Hill in terms of overall performance, the HD 4670 comes up big by packing as many features as possible into one affordable package. It does this while retaining some very respectable gaming capabilities which offer casual gamers a reason to seriously consider it over anything Nvidia has in this same price range. In our books this is a hell of a recipe for success.


Pros:

- Low power consumption
- Demolishes the competition in the sub-$100 price bracket
- Very quiet
- HDMI with optional DisplayPort
- Hardware accelerated VC-1 video decoding
- Price


Cons:

- Availability (for now)