ATI Radeon HD 4670 Graphics Card Review

Power Consumption and Final Thoughts

Power Consumption

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Seasonic Power Angel. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers, we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running the game Call of Duty 4 at 1280×1024 with high graphics quality.

Power Consumption Results: As expected the ATI Radeon HD 3670 was very power efficient at idle as the entire system consumed just 132W. This is very impressive for a discrete graphics card and was 12.6% lower than both the GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9600 GSO. The GeForce 9600 GSO and Radeon HD 4670 are both currently $79, so keep an eye on those two cards.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

The ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card is aimed at the mainstream market, which means those wanting to spend less than $100 on a graphics card. For that price range the Radeon HD 4670 offers some serious bang for the buck and the card that it most closely lines up with from a consumer perspective is the GeForce 9500 GT. For a user that doesn’t want to worry about getting a new power supply or needing adapters the GeForce 9500 GT and Radeon HD 4670 are the two top picks that one should be looking at. After using both of the cards on the test system here on our bench it is clear that the Radeon HD 4670 raises the performance bar for what one can expect for this price range. At 1280×1024 resolutions the Radeon HD 4670 does great even with the Anti-Aliasing cranked up. Those with monitors supporting 1600×1200 resolutions will be able to play games, but the image quality will have to be set to medium rather than high in the majority of newer game titles.

Other than the price tag the power consumption numbers on the card really stand out and that needs to be talked about. NVIDIA and AMD have both done a great job getting the idle power consumption numbers down and the Radeon HD 4670 graphics card is no different. At idle our test system had a total power consumption level of just 132W, which is impressive considering it has the fastest Intel quad-core processor money can buy and a water cooler on it. The Radeon HD 4670 is very efficient at idle and the cooler does a great job keeping it nice and cool. Under load with stock and overclocked clock frequencies the Radeon HD 4670 once again broke the 80C mark, which is pretty toasty. AMD has told us that this is nothing to worry about and below the max spec for the card, but personally I’d like to see some lower temperatures. With that being my biggest gripe about the card it is obvious that AMD has done a great job on the Radeon HD 4670!

With more than two-thirds of all desktop graphics sold today being priced under $100 it seems that ATI has done it again and produced a card that has sent shivers down the spines of the people that set prices over at NVIDIA. In light of this launch NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO graphics cards are now selling for $79 after a $35 mail-in-rebate. The GeForce 9600 GSO and Radeon HD 4670 are pretty close on the gaming front, but NVIDIA has support for CUDA (F@H) and PhysX. This might sway those that want to fold, but for general consumers and those that don’t want to mess with rebates it doesn’t matter too much. In the end the consumer wins as for $79 you can get a great performing graphics card that has the same performance as a DirectX 10 card that cost hundreds of dollars just two years ago.

Legit Bottom Line: AMD keeps on rolling out solid performing products at a price you can’t ignore. The Radeon HD 4670 graphics card is a great card for mainstream systems and will be till the next generation cards come out.