ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series Preview
Our Conclusion
The experimental Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series cards we tested here exhibited very different performance. The higher-end Mobility Radeon HD 4670 showed that it is a capable GPU, that can handle fairly demanding graphics workloads with solid performance, without consuming very much power. The Mobility Radeon HD 4500 series GPU offered much lower 3D performance, but under full load it also consumed much less power, which is an important consideration for the GPU's thin and light target market segment.
The MSI EX625-227US Featuring The Radeon HD 4670
Currently, the Mobility Radeon HD 4670 with 512MB is available in the sub-$900 MSI EX625-227US Professional series notebook and the 4650 can be found in the Asus N81Vp, BenQ Joybook S57 (for Australia, Thailand and Malaysia), and the Toshiba Satellite 300. We have a request for any other information AMD can share regarding other design wins for these mainstream Mobility GPUs, but at this time there isn't much more the company can share until their parters go public with their own announcements. The higher-end 4800 series Mobility Radeons are somewhat easier to find, but the more mainstream 4600 and 4500 series offerings are currently much harder to come by. Hopefully, in time they'll find their way into more notebooks because AMD's base GPU architecture is sound, as is evidenced by ATI's recent success on the desktop.
