The ATI Radeon 4670 Roundup: MSI vs. Palit
The Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super & Test Setup
Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super
The Palit Radeon HD 4670 looks almost identical to MSI's R4670, from the metallic fins sprouting from the cooler, right down to even the position of the MOSFETs and capacitors. And like the MSI R4670, the Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super also uses a shorter PCB, and as such, has memory chips laid on both sides. Also like the MSI R4670, the box that came with the Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super indicates that it is employing DDR3 memory, but further probing reveals that the Samsung K4J52324QH-HJ1A memory chips found on the card are in fact of the GDDR3 variety. Like the Hynix ones found on the MSI card, these Samsung memory are also rated at 1.0ns. The Palit also comes at reference clock speeds.
With the two cards so similar, what makes the Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super special is its variety of video outputs. With the MSI R4670 you only get two DVI outputs, which are sufficient, but with the Palit, you get one of each of the following: VGA, DVI, HDMI and even the newer DisplayPort. Palit is certainly looking ahead.
The following are what came with the Palit Radeon HD 4670 Super:
- Driver CD
- Quick installation guide
Test Setup
We'll be putting the cards through its paces on our slightly old, but trusty Windows XP system, which is configured as such:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz)
- Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard
- 2 x 1GB DDR2-800 Kingston HyperX memory in dual channel mode
- Seagate 7200.7 80GB SATA hard drive
- Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c
And the complete list of cards and driver versions tested are as follows:
- MSI R4670 2D512/D3 (Catalyst 8.8)
- Palit Radeon HD4670 Super (Catalyst 8.8)
- PowerColor PCS HD 4670 (Catalyst 8.8)
- Zotac GeForce 9500 GT AMP! Edition (ForceWare 177.72)
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT (ForceWare 175.19)
- ATI Radeon HD 3850 512MB (Catalyst 8.8)
The results presented were taken using the included time demos and other built-in benchmarking tools available in the following games:-
- Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
- Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
- F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
- World in Conflict (ver 1.05)
- Supreme Commander (patched to 3255)
- Crysis (ver 1.21)
- Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)
With the two cards so similar, we are expecting the benchmarks to be very close. This is going to go down to the wire.