The first sighting of an AMD reference card based on the RV730, which in its consumer guise is expected to be known as the Radeon HD 4600-series, has been spotted and it's claimed that the card in question is more specifically a Radeon HD 4670.

Don't expect this 55nm GPU to be a performance monster, despite the fact that it has 320 Shaders, as it's still limited by a 128-bit memory interface, which will limit the performance of this card.

However, it's expected that it'll beat the Geforce 9500 quite easily, as the Radeon HD 4670 should have its GPU clocked at 700MHz with the GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz (1,800MHz effectively) and with all those Shaders, this card should still be an interesting product in the sub-US$150 market.

Expect to see 512Mb and 1GB versions of this card, and we wouldn't rule out the possibility of a cheaper 256MB version, as well. The cards will offer DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, D-sub and TV-out connectivity, although we have to wait for final production cards to see what AMDs partners will add in terms of ports on these cards.

Our only concern is that the reference cooler looks quite small and noisy, but hopefully AMD's partners will step up and provide some better cooling solutions. With an expected TDP of 70W we might even see some decent passively cooled cards.

You can find some more details and pictures of the reference card here.