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Published: November 9, 2008 | Source: HIS | Author: Thomas Koflach

HIS Radeon 4670, 4830 & 4850 Mid Range Round-Up

Specification & Packaging
 
Representing the budget end of the scale, we have the 4670. Whilst this GPU may have the lowest specification, it does feature the powerful IceQ cooler, hinting at a big pre-overclock. To our disappointment, however, it wasn’t pre-overclocked and ran at the GPU’s stock frequencies.
 
Here are the full specs:
 
Powered by Radeon® HD 4670 GPU
Innovative IceQ Cooling technology
320 stream processing units
DirectX® 10.1
24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
Dual mode ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
PCI Express® 2.0 support
 
Core Clock: 750mhz
Ramdac: 400mhz
Memory Size: 512mb
Memory Type: GDDR3
Memory Clock: 2000mhz
Memory Interface: 128bit

 

While the standard clocks of 750mhz core and 1000mhz memory are a bit of a disappointment, the custom cooler will hopefully mean the card runs cooler & quieter.

Packaging & Appearance
 
Although this card is far from a high-end card, HIS certainly haven’t cut corners on the packaging. It’s not too complicated and contains all the information you would want to see on the front of a box. It is printed on glossy card and feels very nice.
 
HIS 4670 IceQ HIS 4670 IceQ
 
As you can see, HIS have taken the liberty of cutting a little window for you to view the card inside. The cooler dominates this window, and you can certainly tell this is far from standard. On the back of the box there is an in-depth specification of the card and the usual warranty & features information.
 
HIS 4670 IceQ HIS 4670 IceQ
 
Once you have opened the initial packaging, you are presented with another box. This offers great protection to the card, ensuring it gets to you in pristine condition. Once you open the flap on the box, you can lift out the moulded plastic holding the card and accessories. Underneath the plastic is the driver CD and user manual.
 
HIS 4670 IceQ
 
 There is a nice selection of accessories, although nothing out of the ordinary, such as the multi-function tool we saw with the 4850. Here you can see: User Manual, Crossfire bridge, D-Dub adapter, HDMI adapter, Warranty leaflet and driver CD.
 
 
Card Appearance
 
Once you have opened up the mould and taken the card out of its foam cushion, you can take a closer look at the card itself.
 
HIS 4670 IceQ HIS 4670 Up close
HIS 4670 IceQ HIS 4670 Rear view
 
There was something that surprised us upon putting the card down – the cooler is longer than the card itself. Not only is it double the height of the stock cooler, but a good deal longer as well. The cooler is covered with an interesting graphic containing the HIS and IceQ logos. The fan is made out of transparent blue plastic; we were expecting it to contain an LED or two, but it seems HIS haven’t followed this trend.
 
Something which we noticed on close examination was that the cooler did not seem to come into contact with the card’s memory modules.
 
HIS 4670 IceQ
 
Our suspicions seem to have been correct. As you can see, there is a fairly large amount of TIM on the core itself, yet the memory modules have none at all. The cooler doesn’t seem to have been designed to accommodate the memory – let’s hope this absence of cooling doesn’t effect stability in any way.