Reviews - Sapphire (AMD) Radeon HD 4670: bullying the mainstream market

[HEXUS]

Unleashing more shading power than R600, the Radeon HD 4670 redefines the mainstream market.

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[Emirzan]

Odd choices of output connections on the reference design, good to see them changed by msi. Amazing how much things change over 18 months, wonder what cards we'll be looking at in March 2010?

[Mithrandir]

Wow! The performance for the money is amazing, great for budget builds. I can see nvidia probably lowering the prices again (this time with the 9600 series )

[chrestomanci]

Why the graphs in flash format?

I don't like them. They may look pretty, but they convey less information than plan 2D graphs as simple images. They also cause my browser to consume more memory and CPU than it would otherwise. (And Firefox is bad enough at that without any encouragement). Also, if I where viewing the site on my 64 bit linux box at home, I would not be able to see the graphs at all, as flash support is fairly flaky, so I usually leave it turned off as it often causes browser crashes.

Please go back to normal graphs, or if you must display them in 3D, please use SVG, with is an official W3C standard that should supported by all browsers, usually without excessive resource consumption.

[Steve]

Hi,

I'm developing on a 64-bit Linux system, and yes flash is a little flaky at times, but it works.

The site will fall-back to a table of results in the event that the user has flash turned off, or simply doesn't have flash.

We chose to use a flash-based graphing engine for various reasons. Sufficient to say it was the best choice for us.

I contest the fact that they convey less information. Currently they more or less match what our old graphs presented, however there's a lot more we can do with them, but as it's a new feature we haven't built upon it yet.

[CK_1985]

Thoses are some impressive figures - I always knew the 9500GT was a bit sucky, but this has proved it!

Forgive my ignorance but would this work in Hybrid Crossfire on a 790GX board? If it could leverage some performance benefit from the IGP that would make a much more realistic and affordable "HTPC for occasional gaming" than anything we've seen before.

[Bob Crabtree]

Excellent stuff!

Seems to me to mark a sea-change in the market and to be VERY good news for all kinds of would-be users and buyers.

What I'm waiting for are variants with passive cooling - which will surely be along shortly.

I have a couple of candidate (non-gaming) PCs that could do with decent, but quiet, graphics upgrades, including a Q6600 Dell bought on a whim from Tesco the other week for £299 (and I'm still pinching myself about that price!).

Bob

[richieuk]

Making my build alot easier on the pocket, I'm actually seriously tempted to pick up a 4670 over a 4850 now... £70 is a MASSIVE saving, and I could certainly live with 50fps at 1280 res on COD4...

I'd like to see a bang-for-buck benchmarking difference between the new Sapphire 4850 (Dual Slot cooler) and the new 4670 if hexus would like to rise to the challenge?

I'm a student so proposing all the savings I can make without drastically affecting longevity would be massivley helpful.

[Zak33]

awesome value for money. Low power too.

Think I'll be building a few rigs for mates with these little babies

[deruberhanyok]

Hexus team,

I like the new graphs (I'd prefer some sort of standard non-flash format as well but these are pretty nice, and as you've said you have a backup in place), but two quick suggestions:

1) keep the colors used to represent each card consistent across the entire article (the blue, black and green switching around was jarring after the first page)
2) the two reds used look very, very close to being the same color on the computers here at work. They could all be way off but it was a little hard to pick out the differences in the shades.

Thanks for the review!

(btw, been reading for a while and just now registering to post. love the site!)

[Tarinder]

Making my build alot easier on the pocket, I'm actually seriously tempted to pick up a 4670 over a 4850 now... £70 is a MASSIVE saving, and I could certainly live with 50fps at 1280 res on COD4...

I'd like to see a bang-for-buck benchmarking difference between the new Sapphire 4850 (Dual Slot cooler) and the new 4670 if hexus would like to rise to the challenge?

I'm a student so proposing all the savings I can make without drastically affecting longevity would be massivley helpful.

Funny you should say that. We're knee-deep in CrossFire testing and the obvious comparison is the HD 4850. We will publish on the findings tomorrow, most likely.

[moogle]

theres a fix for firefox for flash on ubuntu x64. Was working fine for me. Don't totally remove the flash just put in a backup system for those that don't have it. Although I do agree 2D bars are better than the 3D ones.

[DR]

There is so many benefits to the way that we do it now - we will no doubt be adding the backup to go in the place of the graphs *real soon.

[directhex]

I'd prefer some sort of standard non-flash format

how about some silverlight?

[Tidus]

What a bargain at £50, I liked the new graphs aswell, you could do with moving the numbers up a bit higher from the bars though as the darker bars make the figures hard to read.

[chrestomanci]

theres a fix for firefox for flash on ubuntu x64. Was working fine for me. Don't totally remove the flash just put in a backup system for those that don't have it. Although I do agree 2D bars are better than the 3D ones.

I know there are fixes, but that only deals with part of the problem. My main objection to flash is that it sucks resources for no good reason.

I also think the 3D graphs are harder to read and hide information. They are drawn in perspective which can make two bars that are the same size appear different. They may look impressive on a powerpoint slide when your intention is to prove your argument, but when you are presenting information in a neutral manner, your graphs should be as clear as possible and should not give any false impression.

Suppose in those 3D graphs, the nVida score was always nearer, and so appeared bigger in perspective, and suppose Hexus was carrying a lot of nVidia banner adverts. Some people might draw a false conclusion about Hexus's motives or neutrality.