ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series Preview

One of the ways AMD is able to test and qualify ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs, without having to design and build numerous mobile reference cards that fit in multiple notebook form factors, is to produce fully-loaded, custom reference cards that’ll fit into standard PCI Express x16 slots. The cards won’t be used in any actual retail product, but they allow AMD to test all of the various features and functionality, and experiment with clock speeds and voltages to fine tune and balance performance, thermal output, and power consumption.

What you see pictured here is just such a card. The item pictured below is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670, PCI Express-based reference card. We talked about the new mobility Radeon HD 4000 series during CES earlier this year; more details are available at this link. The reference card pictured here is equipped with every type of output supported by the GPU–Displayport, DVI, VGA, S-Video / HD component, and HDMI–and it even has CrossFire connectors for experimenting with multi-GPU configurations.  We’ve had a couple of Mobility Radeon HD 4670 and 4500 class reference cards in house for a while now, and have a sneak peek at approximate performance using a desktop platform for testing on the pages ahead.

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