HIS has brought some of their experience with aftermarket cooling and a factory overclock to the entry level segment of the Radeon line, namely the HD4670.  The Radeon HD4670 lives in the sub $100 arena where expectations have been historically low for performance.  The Radeon HD4670 is looking to change that and take control of this market just as the big HD4870s and HD4870x2s have taken the thrown in the big leagues.

As expected, HIS has taken on a reference HD4670 card and tweaked it with some high performance cooling and a factory overclock.  Together, the addition of these features on the card is enough to make most people stop and see if this bargain priced card is worth a look.  HIS has shipped over a sample of their smaller Radeon over for us to take a look at.  Let's do just that.

Specifications

• Graphics Engine: ATi Radeon HD4670

• Interface: PCI-Express 2.0

• Engine Clock: 780MHz

• Memory Clock: 2.0GHz

• Memory Type/Size: GDDR3/512MB

• Memory Interface: 128-bit

• Stream Processing Units: 320

• Max Resolution: 2560x1600

• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering

• VGA Output: Yes with adapter

• Built in HDMI and 7.1 surround audio

• Full HD 1080p

• ATi AVIVO HD video and display technology

• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blue-Ray and HD Video

• DVI: two ports

• Native CrossfireX support

• DirectX 10.1 Support

Where it fits in.

Before we get into looking specifically at the HIS HD4670 card, let's put everything into perspective.  The rational for having a presence in the under $100 market is simple enough; HTPCs, budget game rigs, etc.  To get the card priced at that point, what was lost.  Well let's look at the differences between the HD4670 and the HD4870 as well as the older HD3870.

Product	Stream Processors	Core Speed	Memory Speed	Memory Bus	Transistors
HD4670	320	750MHz	2GHz GDDR3	128-bit	514M
HD4870	800	750MHz	3.6GHz GDDR5	256-bit	956M
HD3870	320	825MHz	2.25GHz GDDR3	256-bit	667M

As you can see, when you compare the HD4670 to the current HD4870, there is a huge difference between the two cards.  Take a step back and look at the HD3870 of just six months ago.  With the exception of the memory bus, the HD4670 brings much of the same performance seen in the upper echelon of earlier this year.  Let's shift our gaze back to the HIS version of this entry level card.

What you get

Opening up the box, we find with the HIS Radeon HD4670 IceQ Turbo card, a driver CD, DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, installation guide, along with a HIS case badge.  No extra demo disks or other software swag.  One thing that was especially surprising was the absence of a Crossfire bridge cable.  The HD4670 is a Crossfire ready card and to run Crossfire you need two bridge cables.  That's why all ATi partners ship one cable with every Crossfire ready card.  In all honesty, most sub $100 shoppers won't be looking to run two entry level cards in Crossfire but there will be some...

NEXT

Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Test Bed/Benchmarks
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks/Image Quality/Conclusion