The Radeon HD4890 is currently the top of the line single GPU graphics card available from AMD. While it may be a rather subtle upgrade overly the extremely popular Radeon HD4870, it does offer refinements in terms of energy efficiency and performance that should appeal to gamers looking to get the best bang for their buck. Never satisfied with just releasing a typical product,
Sapphire now offers a variety of Radeon HD4890 cards, including the factory overclocked Vapor-X Radeon HD4890 1GB unit shown in the promotional image below.
This card gives the reference design RV790 GPU a slight speed boost from 850MHz to 870MHz, while also giving the GDDR5 memory a bump from 975MHz to 1050MHz. During this review we will take a closer look at the physical features and performance enhancements that make the Vapor-X Radeon HD4890 stand out. Before we get to that though, let's take a closer look at some published data on it as taken from the
official product page on the Sapphire website.
Features:
» Factory overclocked at 870 MHz.
» Sapphire Patent Pending Black Diamond Choke
» Quiet and Powerful Dual Slot Vapor-Chamber Cooler
» Under 20 dbA in 2D Operation
» Under 30 dbA in 3D Operation before 85 degree ℃.
» Solid Capacitors
» 1 GB of GDDR5 memory
» DirectX 10.1 support
» 800 stream processing units
» 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
» Quad mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
» PCI Express 2.0 support
» Dynamic geometry acceleration
» Game physics processing capability
» ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
» Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
» Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
» DVD Upscaling
» Dynamic Contrast
» Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
» Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology
» ATI Stream technology
Specifications:
» I/O Output: Display Port+HDMI+DL-DVI+VGA
» Core Clock: 870 MHz
» Memory Clock: 1050 MHz, 4.2 Gbps
» PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
» 1024MB /256bit GDDR5 memory interface
» Dual Slot Vapor-X Cooler
» HDMI compliant via dongle
» 7.1 Audio Channel Support
» Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support
» Shader Model 4.1 support
