AMD ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Final Thoughts...

Had this been a straight comparison between the 4670 and Nvidia's GeForce 9500 GT, this conclusion would be incredibly easy to write because the 9500 GT gets completely obliterated by the new mainstream card from AMD. It's not like that though, because we wanted to look at the bigger picture. And upon looking at the bigger picture, shadows of doubt star to creep in.

You see, the 4670 is a decidedly mid-table product in the tests we've completed here, but it's unclear whether this will hit £50 or £60 at the moment. We were expecting this to be a hard launch, but sadly upon looking around UK etailers, nobody seems to have stock at the time of writing.

The GeForce 9600 GSO, despite its shady naming, now looks to be an interesting option and if Nvidia can optimise the GeForce 9600 GT's price point, that could make things interesting for the Radeon HD 4670 as well because the combination of 64 stream processors and a 256-bit memory interface makes for a card that's faster in most scenarios that we've tested here.

Generally speaking, spending more money in the mainstream arena nets you quite a bit more performance in some scenarios and if the 4670 hits closer to £60 than £50, and the XFX 9600 GSO XXX Edition manages to drop under £70, you'll find better value for money in the Nvidia part. Obviously, performance is higher, but it's also proportionally higher when you factor in cost as well.

This is the sensitivity of the mainstream market down to a tee and in some ways it goes back to The Sea of Grey article I wrote a while back - the same applies here to some degree because the price points could end up so close together that you could end up with proportionally more performance available depending on how much more you spend.

If you take the 9500 GT as a starting point and work up, then the 4670 offers some incredible value for money against it. However, if you then make the next step, you'll not only get more performance but in some scenarios, quite a bit more performance than the financial outlay would imply.

With that in mind, there's a lot to like about the Radeon HD 4670, but as is always the case with mainstream hardware, it's impossible to judge how good it is without final pricing confirmed. However, based on current pricing, XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition is well over £75 and the cheapest GeForce 9600 GT is over £70.

As long as AMD's suggested pricing is right and the competitive landscape doesn't completely change, the 4670 remains a good choice. However, if the market changes around it, the 4670 could begin to look like rather poor value - such is the way with the volatile mainstream graphics card market.

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• 8/10

What do these scores mean?