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Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB OC
Introduction
Alright. Time for a refresh, it's almost spring, and that's the season for growing video cards. The HD 4890 is, for all intensive porpoises, a retooled HD 4870, which, in my humble opinion, is overdue. Not that the 4870 was by any means a bad card, and it certainly got its deserved amount of press, but it had its failings and, when prices were even, I'd generally recommend a GTX 260. Prices rarely were even, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you like to root for. But on the pretty good chance that you were getting a 4870 because it was cheaper, it was easy to overlook its major shortcomings. It wasn't a quiet card, not that many of its class are, but more to the point it even idled power-hungry, and, particularly with the 512MB versions, didn't like to antialias much.    Then the one gigabyte refresh came along and made it a little more competitive, right about when NVIDIA started selling the better 216-processor GTX 260. Once again, it came down to price. AMD doesn't like losing on the price front, that's for damn sure. But it never hurts to have a great high-end card, either. Look, this card still isn't a match for the ridongulous GTX 285 or the limited 295, but it's an outstanding improvement over the HD 4870. Enough to upgrade?    The Card & Bundle OK, FedEx box, check. Bubble wrap, check. Uh, FedEx--wait, we went over this. I got a sample card, so no goodies. There are substantive improvements over the HD 4870 with this design. It seems that the stickers are a lot more minimalistic, with a nearly fully-clothed shootist crossing her massive pistols on this product. But if you look closely, the heatsink beneath the sticker has been modified, with three heatpipes over the previous two. One fat one in the middle and two regular ones.     The card is powered by dual 6-pin auxiliary power connectors, which should allay some fears about its power consumption, although 225W is still a high ceiling. Top it off with its requisite twin CrossFire connectors, and it's looking a whole lot like an ATI HD 4000-series video card.  And it seems that most of the samples going out are factory overclocked, cool, so this card gets a 50MHz bump over the default GPU clocks.
Page 1: Introduction, The Card & Bundle
Page 2: Specifications and Setup Page 3: DirectX 10 Titles Page 4: DX9, OpenGL, and Synthetics Page 5: Video, Power, and Overclocking Page 6: Conclusion 
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