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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Friday, September 19, 2008
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The market for video cards in
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Friday, September 12, 2008
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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.
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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.
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Thursday, September 11, 2008
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AMD is releasing a new salvo of mainstream graphics cards today that should fall in the sub-$80 price segment, dubbed the Radeon HD 4670. The GPU at the heart of the 4670 is based on the same RV770 architecture used on the Radeon HD 4800 series, sans a few stream processors, ROPs, and other assorted elements, but with what is essentially the same feature set as its more expensive counterparts. We've got a couple of these new cards on hand and plan to show you what they're capable of on the pages ahead. After reading, you may be surprised by what 80 bucks can get you these days...
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Wednesday, September 10, 2008
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We recently looked at the HD4870 X2 and were easily convinced that it is currently the fastest single card solution in the market. So we did what any righteous hardware editor would do- put two of them together. Now, if you remember, the X2 by itself shows its true powers at very high resolutions with all details turned on.
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Monday, September 1, 2008
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The All in Wonder HD is an interesting jack of all trades video card. The good points include the ability to playback and record live TV on the PC, decent gaming performance in the form of the HD 3650 and the ability to run FM Radio. If gaming is your primary concern it would be better to buy a HD 4850 and a HDTV tuner if that is the route you want to go but the A-I-W HD is targeted for the home theater crowd not the hardcore gamer. For the casual gamer wanting to watch TV or listen to FM Radio, the A-I-W HD is definitely an excellent buy as you get much more than just a video card. For the Home Theater crowd, the A-I-W HD fits the bill in spades with the ability to watch HDTV, and HD content like Blu Ray discs without another card or additional software.
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Friday, August 29, 2008
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For a retail price of $230, the 9950 is an interesting choice from AMD. This has driven the price of the 9850 Black Edition down to the $200 level in 1000 unit quantities. The 9950 performs higher than the 9850 across the board as to be expected from a CPU that doesn't have any architectural differences than the higher clock speed over the older CPU.For those wanting performance, but at an affordable cost the 9950 does well for the target area its aimed at. It plays games, runs Photoshop and works with all media without a problem. Not the fastest CPU in the world, but neither is it a lag dog.
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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Today I will be looking at ATI's most recent release, the Radeon HD 4870 X2. I can't quite imagine the performance capacity of a pair of HD 4850s, so I really have no idea what to expect from twin 4870s, complete with two full gigs of DDR5 memory. This will be my first ATI-branded Radeon card, which will make things even more interesting. Will the 4870 X2 offer the ultimate 3D graphics experience? Read on to see!
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First of all, it was planned to oppose GeForce GTX 280 with CrossFire configurations based on two separate HD 4850 or HD 4870 cards. Then the company presented a dual-GPU solution on a single PCB, the RADEON HD 4870 X2. We've already published its preview with several tests. Now it's time for a sterling article with theoretical data, synthetic tests, and an expanded set of games.
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When ATI was acquired by AMD a few years ago, one product that seemed to fall off of the new corporate radar was ATI's All-In-Wonder line of Graphics/TV-Tuner hybrid cards. This was an area of the market where ATI had exclusivity, yet we haven't seen a new All-In-Wonder offering since May 2006. Rest assured however, ATI has not abandoned the All-In-Wonder, they've simply been working on the next iteration of the Graphic/TV-Tuner stalwart, with their latest offering coming in the form of the ATI All-In-Wonder HD.
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
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Just the other day, I was talking about how the HD 4870 X2 is a great card for P45 users. When I tested HD 4870 in CrossFire a few months back on both the P45 and X48, we noticed that the x8 / x8 configuration present on the P45 actually gave us a bit of a hit in performance. So, what we're going to do today is chuck a pair of Sapphire HD 4870s into a P45 board and do a bunch of tests. We're then going to pull those two cards out and stick in a single HD 4870 X2. We will run the same tests and proceed to compare. Since we've already looked at the cards themselves, we're just going to get stuck straight into the benchmarking side of things. Let's begin by taking a quick look at our testbed we're using today, before getting stuck straight into the benchmarks.
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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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AMD has done a great job with the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and it has snatched the crown for the fastest graphics card in the world back from Nvidia in the process. Like we've said though, it's not all rosy and there are drawbacks associated with buying a Radeon HD 4870 X2, just like there are with any other multi-GPU configuration. As long as you're prepared to accept them, then the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is well worth considering if you've got that kind of cash to throw around.
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When we reviewed the HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 earlier, we spoke of the R700 card that has yet to arrive. Well, we are pleased to say that it is finally in our labs. Consisting of two RV770 GPUs on a single PCB, we see if it has what it takes to oust NVIDIA's fearsome GTX 280 as the fastest single graphics card.
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While details on AMD's high-end ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card began surfacing last month, today this dual-GPU graphics card has formally launched and will begin shipping to retailers. The good news this time around is that this graphics card will actually be something worth looking at under Linux now that there's the needed CrossFire support on the horizon. We're not yet permitted to publish the Linux CrossFire benchmarks, but today we have a few pieces of information to share about the Radeon HD 4870 X2 on Linux.
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
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The Radeon HD 4800 series didn't exactly overwhelm NVIDIA's GTX 200 series with raw performance. In fact, the GeForce GTX 280 and 9800 GX2 were more powerful than the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4800 series cards, however, were still excellent cards and they were offered at extremely competitive prices, which put significant pressure on NVIDA. At the time of their launch, the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 were both less expensive and more powerful than the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce GTX 260, respectively. Since then, NVIDIA has reacted with a quick round of price cuts. While enthusiasts were contemplating the purchase of a new Radeon or GeForce, AMD then planted another seed and released some concrete details regarding the Radeon HD 4870 X2, as if to say, "Yeah, we've got you covered at the $300 price point and a new, ultra powerful behemoth is coming real soon too. Maybe you should hold onto your upgrade money for a bit?" That behemoth is the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and it arrives today. As its name suggests, the card features two RV770 GPUs running in tandem, for what is effectively a Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire configuration on a single PCB. Other than its pair of GPUs, however, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has a few more differentiating factors we're now able to tell you about. Read on for the full scoop...
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