AMD has recently launched their Radeon HD 4650 and HD 4670 cards which are positioned in the lower midrange sub-$100 segment. The cards are designed to have enough 3D performance for casual gamers and all the great video playback features that ATI has produced over the years. These cards are the lower part of the already successful Radeon HD 4800 series which brough ATI back into the market. And they are hoping the same thing to happen with these new Radeon HD 4600 series for the mid-range segment. Today we have the HIS Radeon HD 4670 IceQ Turbo on the testbench. It is equipped with a fan made by Arctic Cooling and sports a slightly increased core clock of 780MHz. - techPowerUp

HIS Radeon HD 4670 IceQ 512MB Turbo Style Review

The HIS package has a small hole through which you can see the card. Near the top is a Turbo sticker which declares this card an overclocked edition. It's very nice to have the actual clock speeds listed on it as well. On the back you find a lot of further product information in multiple languages. HIS has chosen a dual slot cooler design for optimum cooling performance. As you can also see, the memory chips are not cooled at all. The card has two DVI ports which is the standard output configuration nowadays. The cooler of the Radeon HD 4670 IceQ Turbo is the famous Silencer made by Arctic Cooling.

You may combine two, three or even four RV730 based cards in CrossFire for increased performance or better image quality settings. An external power connector is not needed as the card will draw all its power from the PCI Express interface. The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix. With a latency of 1.0ns they should be good for at least 2000MHz effective operating speed. These are basically the same chips as used on the high-end Radeon HD 4850 cards. The card is power by a 55nm RV730 which is actually the little brother of the RV770 used on the already well known and faster Radeon HD 4800 series.

Now to find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of AMD internal overclocking software and our benchmarking suite. The final overclocks of our card are 863MHz core and 2280MHz memory. Both overclocks are very quite impressive, it looks like there is quite some headroom left in the RV730 design. We wonder why HIS were so conservative with the clock selection on their overclocked edition though. As 825MHz would have been a really nice default core clock for this card. Maybe AMD had something to do with it. And on top of all that the Radeon HD 4670 version runs comfortably cool.

The new AMD Radeon HD 4670 series made quite some waves in the graphics cards industry. It has established itself as an excellent performing choice in the sub-$100 lower midrange segment. While certain cards from NVIDIA are still offering a slightly better price to performance ratio the difference is quite small, but at least you have a choice between AMD and NVIDIA now. HIS took the well known Arctic Cooling cooler and slapped it on their Radeon HD 4670 board design. Unfortunately the BIOS defaults to a rather high fan speed when temperatures are low, resulting in low temps but more fan noise.

Now HIS also increased the core clock by 30MHz but the real-life performance increase is only minor. Given the nice overclocking potential we saw we can't understand why they did not increase the clocks some more. Overall the HIS Radeon HD 4670 IceQ Turbo is a great choice when looking for a Radeon HD 4670 card, but some minor things could still be improved.