Geeks give HD 4670 the thumbs-up

DAAMIT SEEMS INTENT on leaving no stone unturned in its pursuit of graphics world domination. Last night reviews started pouring in of the new HD 4670 (RV730) mid-to-low-end graphics card. The HD 4670’s performance was, to most reviewers, astonishingly good. Good enough for almost all of them to recommend it to fit your “budget-conscious” gamer profile or HTPC gamer. Crossfire performance, as seen in the Tweak Town article, for example, closes the gap with the HD 4850 and sometimes even overtakes it. That's a sub-$100 card we're talking about...

Gobsmacked they are.

We’ve collected a few links for your perusal. They’re more or less unanimous, but some are more complete than others (including face-offs with the competitor, overclocking and power consumption numbers).

In no particular order:

Anandtech

Chile Hardware (Googlenglish)

TechPowerUp

PC Games Hardware

Hexus.net

Tweak Town

Guru3D

Neosee ker

Driver Heaven

Hot Hardware

Firing Squad

Hardware.fr (Googlenglish)

AMDZone

NAS is a dime a dozen, and Xbit has another one for you: the Promise SmartStor NS2300N Home Digital Media Server. This is a 2-bay unit with a Freescale SoC doing all the magic. Promise, of course, gave the unit some advanc ed RAID capabilities and a handy plug-in feature. The fan will be a problem if you want to keep it in the living room or something but good USB performance and software make it something of a buy. Get it here.

Tweak Town has been fiddling with some neat high-end DDR2 from Chaintech, the Apogee GT DDR2-1150 2x2GB kit. Yes, DDR2 isn’t going away anytime soon and enthusiasts will appreciate that companies continue to put out faster and denser parts that will get them a little bit more performance. Chaintech isn’t one of the big memory vendors but they’re trying. The kit looks like Corsair’s Dominator series with the comb-like heatsink, and performance is similar to Geil and Aeneon’s top of the range DDR2. There’s lots to be read, right here.

If there was something we could actually gripe about when the RV770 marchitecture was launched, that was the reference design’s fan performance and heat generation. Well Adrian Rojak and Kyle Bennett both wrote up guides to hacking your fan’s performance, within the Catalyst Control Center. This way you can override the crap defaults that come with the RV770. No fans were injured in the making of these articles: TechARP and HardOCP.

Hardspell has a little update on the state of that oddity, the Phenom/Athlon X2 6500. The jury is still out on what the naming really is, but you can look at some CPU-Z grabs and see how Hardspell underclocked an old X2 5000+ to 2.3GHz so they could have a clock-for-clock performance comparison. The new CPU is about 17 per cent faster in SuperPI. Not bad, eh? There are two links to this one: here and here. Will this be another "Pentium Dual Core vs. Core 2 Duo" situation?

Noctua, the Austrian cooling experts, have come up with a neat chipset cooler product dubbed the NC U6 Chipset Cooler. Techware Labs has one and Artiom had a good experience with it. It’s a bit tall, but you can turn it around 120 degrees to avoid your other components. You’ll have to pull the mobo out if you want to set this up correctly, though. The northbridge was 3℃ cooler than the stock Nvidia heatsink… not bad. Give it a try. µ