AMD ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Nvidia attempts to parry AMD's big stick

In the run up to this launch, AMD wanted us to compare this card to Nvidia's GeForce 9500 GT 512MB, which is supposed to be at the same price point. Now, none of the Nvidia partners seemed to want this comparison to happen – and that was without me even mentioning the Radeon HD 4600 series because I was bound by embargo.

Anyway, after talking to at least four different partners, time was getting short and it was fairly late Friday afternoon. I decided to order one because I felt it need to be included in this comparison at least for comparison's sake. After paying for Saturday delivery, my wallet was £65 lighter – the card itself was just over £50 (inc. VAT), for what it's worth.

There are 256MB versions available for about a tenner less, but I felt that the fairest comparison for this card would have been with a 512MB frame buffer, so that's what I opted for.

It wasn't long after I ordered that I had a phone call from Nvidia. This wasn't in relation to my 9500 GT purchase (now that'd be freaky), but instead relating to the GeForce 8800 GS 9600 GSO – the card that Nvidia felt was the best it had to offer against the new Radeon.


I'd already got an 8800 GS sitting in the office, so I declined the offer of XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition at first, but then later decided that it might be interesting to look at one of the newer reinvigorated 9600 series cards. After all, XFX was boasting a significant factory overclock and, when Nvidia's price reshuffle comes into play, this card should retail at well under £70 including Mr. Darling's cut if what I'm told is correct.

It was no surprise that XFX's 9600 GSO is just like the company's previous 8800 GS – this is not XFX's fault, but it's annoying and confusing to see products like this just change name for the sake of it. Even more disappointingly, it just adds a bit of confusion to the GeForce 9600 series – the only part of the 9 series that was worth investing into in my opinion, because it wasn't something that had already been seen in another disguise in the past twelve months.


Forgetting all of that though, what XFX has done here is create a pretty stylish and speedy graphics card that comes complete with a black PCB, fluorescent yellow DVI ports and an XFX-branded support bracket along the top edge of the card. The cooler is a familiar design that draws some stark similarities to the GeForce 6800 GT's reference cooler – man, that's going back a bit... but it was only four years ago!

In terms of clock speeds, XFX has increased the core speed to a healthy 680MHz while the shaders and memory run at 1,700MHz and 1,900MHz (effective) respectively. These frequency increases represent overclocks of 23.6 percent on both core and shader clocks and 18.75 percent on the memory. They're some pretty impressive advances for a factory-overclocked board.