Disappointed

Up to now I have been using a BFG 7950GT 256mb card in my machine which is solely used to run Flight Simulator X with Service Packs and Acceleration pack plus a pile of add-ons.

Things had been going well until my card decided that it didn't want to 'seat' properly in its PCI-e slot any more. When I tried to start up all I got was three 'bleeps' and no picture. Unfortunately the card seems fine in other ways. Anyhow, used this as an excuse to change my card. Didn't want massive layout not least because my power supply is a humble 250W affair and I don't have a lot of room. Opted for a Powercolor HD4670 1Gb as a replacement. Result - what a let down :-(

It gets such good write ups but is definitely markedly inferior to my previous 7950GT even though it is newer and has 4x the memory. At times it seems to struggle even though I have lowered the resolution from my my monitors 1680 x 1050 native. I can only assume that the memory is not as important a performance factor here compared to the 128 vs 256 bit difference? I don't think it is even any way better than the Asus 8600GT Silent I have in another machine.

Should I have purchased something a little heftier or am I missing something here? Any advice on set up etc would be greatly appreciated - otherwise a well priced, barely used 1Gb HD 4670 will be appearing on ebay in the not too distant future. :-)

Regards,

MarkS.

BTW System is Acer M Series with 4Gb ram, Q6600 quad core @2.7GHz

Check out the GPU charts here on Toms. Flight Simulator appears to favor nVidia cards, especially if you are looking at decent frame rates of 30+. The 9600GT is a decent priced card that appears to do very well in the benchmarks. The 4670 is pretty weak on these charts, I would suggest sticking to nVidia for your needs with this game.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] 2,781.html

Based on the GPU charts the both score about 25 fps at that resolution (with 512mb versions of both cards)...

Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
Fraps/Freeflight
(1680x1050, 0xAA, Bilinear, Ultra Quality)
Score in FPS 4670=24.90 7950gt=25.10

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] 2,781.html

With the top cards getting about 5-7 fps higher I wouldn't expect a whole lot of extra fps from a similar card that has more memory. Return it if you can, and then use the chart to pick a better performing card. Make sure you keep an eye on the power requirements as well. There are plenty of posts daily on power supplies, and you can easily find one adequate for your needs under $50.

I don't look at the toms hardware charts, but at 0ther reviewers.

Did you uninstall the nVidia Drivers Properly before hand?

If you didn't then you'll have all kinds or performance problems when trying to install ATI drivers on top of them. Since the M series uses onboard video make sure you disabled it and uninstalled it's drivers before installing drivers for the 4670.

It could also be that Catalyst Control Center is hogging to many of your resources. The Acer M series is generally a low end computer so the CCC can considerably degrade performance. You may want to try just installing the drivers. I didn't use CCC on my old Athlon 3000+ with it's 1950GT until version 8.11 since previous versions always got a big performance hit, especially in the 7.x series.

Not enough POWER

While the 4670 uses less power than the 7950GT it doesn't have an external power connector so it has to draw all of it's power from the PCI-E slot. Since it can use up to 75W it's possible that it's not getting what it wants under load from the motherboard and it can't draw power from a secondary connector like the 7950GT can. Honestly I'm surprised your 7950GT worked with that PSU .

the 9600gt is faster than a 4670. it might come close but the gt is still faster.

Thanks to all for your replys.

I was also surprised that the 7950GT worked so well - I bought it from my brother for a nominal sum just to see if it would.

I shall try all the options you have supplied and post on the outcomes.

Many thanks.

MarkS.