Radeon 4670 and GeForce 9600 GSO

Board design

With a max board power draw of just 59W, the Radeon 4670 gets all its power from the PCIe interface, no external power connector is needed for operation. The board design of the card itself is quite simple, and the board’s PCB measures just a hair over 6.5”.

For cooling the RV730 GPU, ATI has integrated the same single-slot cooler used on the Radeon 3650. It’s an all-copper heatsink/fan unit with a ducted design that blows cool air over the GPU and out the left end of the duct. A copper plate is used to disperse heat off the GPU and memory modules on the top of the card, while the memory modules on the bottom of the card sit naked and uncooled.

Finally, a variable speed fan is responsible for supplying fresh cool air to the card. The fan runs quite quietly, although those of you concerned about board temps won’t be glad to hear that we observed board temps of 60 degrees Celsius at idle and 76 degrees at load. Fortunately the PCB itself doesn’t get nearly as hot as the 4850, so we don’t think the situation is quite as bad as the 4850 was, but it still wouldn’t hurt if ATI would crank up the fan’s RPMs a little more to keep the GPU cooler.

ATI continues to outfit the reference board design with two dual-link display outputs. HDMI and DisplayPort are also supported by the GPU as well, so conceivably we’ll see cards from select ATI board partners touting these display capabilities at some point in the near future. The Radeon 4600 series also supports integrated 8-channel digital audio natively over DisplayPort and HDMI. With GeForce GPUs a passthru cable must be connected from your graphics card to your sound card in order to pass audio over HDMI, so the Radeon 4600 card eliminates the hassle of connecting that cable.

GeForce 9600 GSO

To counter the Radeon 4670, NVIDIA is dusting off an old GPU we assumed was on its way to the boneyard for retirement: the GeForce 9600 GSO.

Based on NVIDIA’s popular G92 GPU, the GeForce 9600 GSO was originally prepped to replace the GeForce 8800 GS. Thanks to recent price cuts that just kicked in, prices on these cards start at just $75 after mail-in rebate on Newegg, with factory OC’ed cards selling for just $84. Just what is a GeForce 9600 GSO? It’s basically a GeForce 8800 GT/9800 GT with slower clocks, a narrower memory interface, and some of its shaders disabled. First let’s discuss the shader configuration.

Like the original GeForce 8800 GTS from two years ago, two of the GPU’s shader clusters are disabled on the GeForce 9600 GSO, turning off 32 shaders and leaving a total of 96 functional shaders.

Besides its 96-shader architecture, NVIDIA also disables one 64-bit memory controller on the GeForce 9600 GSO. As a result, this leaves the G92 GSO GPU with a 192-bit memory interface to its GDDR3 memory. The board is then outfitted with either 384MB or 768MB of memory.

Besides the narrower memory interface and reduced shader count, we also mentioned reduced clock speeds. In particular the GeForce 9600 GSO is clocked at 550MHz on the graphics core, while its stream processors run at 1375MHz. Finally, NVIDIA has also reduced the memory clock to 800MHz (1.6GHz effective), yielding 38.4GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth.

Fortunately this is where the cuts end for the GeForce 9600 GSO. NVIDIA uses the exact same reference board design and cooling originally used on the GeForce 8800 GT from last year for the 9600 GSO. While the original 8800 GT cooler was notorious for running hot, NVIDIA improved the card’s fan, making it slightly larger than the original cooler. This has a profound impact on temps and noise, and fortunately this is the exact same fan used for the 9600 GSO.

Officially the GeForce 9600 GSO is positioned between the GeForce 9500 GT, which is priced between $59-$69 and the 64-shader GeForce 9600 GT, which is now priced at $99.

With an MSRP of $79, the GeForce 9600 GSO is priced to take on the Radeon 4670 directly, and while it’s based on NVIDIA’s 65-nm G92 GPU today, NVIDIA has confirmed that like the GeForce 9800 GT, the 9600 GSO will soon be making the transition to 55-nm. 55-nm is in full production today, so expect to see 55-nm GeForce 9600 GSO boards based on NVIDIA’s G92b GPU hit the market in the weeks ahead.