INTRODUCTION is targeted at the moment in the spotlight in the market for ATI video cards on AMD in the near future a new generation of cards, the new DirectX 11 standard support launch. One of these cards is the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 which we have loads of reviews.



However, when a new generation of cards is introduced, we can often agree on a high-end graphics card from the previous generation. Therefore I decided to take a look at the Radeon HD 4890 which has drastically dropped in price since the 5890 was introduced. gone for a long time that was HD 40xx series from AMD with the 4870 HD model, but pushed himself as nVidia, AMD has decided to put out an updated version of this map and call it 4890. Besides the increase of the card’s memory frequency, the HD 4890 also has some extra memory, 1GB GDDR5 instead of the 512MB with 4870 (standard model). OK, before a look at the specifications that you need to know who has published several versions of the Sapphire HD 4890. The one which I will review here is the “Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB GDDR5 PCIe 21150-00-40R “:

GPU RV790 (Radeon HD 4890) Technology, 55nm Stream processors, 800 GPU speed, 850MHz Memory, 1GB GDDR5 Memory speed, 975MHz (3,9Gbps) Bus width 256bits Cooling system Reference cooler Video connectors, 2 x DVI-I HDTV Compatible with HDCP, yes Compatible with CrossFireX, yes Power requirements, 2 x 6 pin PCIe Maximum consumption 190W Supported technologies DirectX 10,1, Shader Model 4,1, UVD 2, ATI Stream, ATI PowerPlay.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The card comes in a rather big cardboard box with a lot of attractive graphics on it, as is customary with all retail graphics card boxes. All inside of the box I found the card in an antistatic plastic bag that was placed among some black plastic protects the foam board. The accessories were placed in a box below the graphics card containing; a printed documentation; CDs with drivers; 3D Mark Vantage; PowerDVD; DVD Suite etc; some video adapters and adapters for molex to PCI-E 6 pin and lastly a CrossFireX bridge. In detail, the paper really more or less the same reference card from ATI, AMD, has the same heatsink / cooling solution and the memory and GPU frequencies are recommended by AMD. Sapphire also has customized models with a greater amount of memory, specialized cooling solutions and overclocked memory and GPUs. The paper is thick, the double slot, mainly because of the size of the heatsink / fan that is carried out of copper and heat pipes to ensure that a mixture of different cooling. The fan has a diameter of 70 mm, which is common with AMD cards. The length (240mm) card is also worth noting that it is quite normal these days with high de carte. This can of course be a problem depending on the space inside your case so measure the available space before purchasing is my advice. The massive cooling solution leaves very few details in mind, but we can see that Sapphire solid capacitors, which should ensure uses, power supply and a stable long-life paper.
The card has 2 6 pin PCIe connectors, reason why along with the power from the PCI-Express port, the card can get to consume up to 225W (in theory). The bracket with the connector consists of a metal grid on top, to facilitate the flow air. The lower part holds two DVI connectors and one HDTV exit. Install Testers ok, so for this post I did the following test system: Phenom II 920 testers CPU Cooler Cooler Master Hyper N520 Motherboard Sapphire PC-AM2RD790 – CrossFireX Graphics Card Sapphire Radeon PUREE HD 4890 Sound Card Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.
1 Memory Kingston HyperX DDR2 1066 2×2GB T1 Series Hard disk Samsung SP2504C (SATA II, 7200rmp, 8MB) Power supply Zalman ZM660-XT Case Antec Skeleton Operating system and software OS Windows XP SP3 Drivers BIOS R7LS422 Catalyst 9. 9 DirectX 9 (August 2009) benchmark 3D Mark 2006 FurMark a.
7 Lightmark 2008 Games World in Conflict: Soviet Assault Street Fighter IV Crysis Warhead X3: Meeting X3: Terran Conflict Officers’ Club of Revolutionary Armed Forces Cry 2 WEAPON 2 Stalker: Clear Sky The Last Remnant Other software CPU-Z 1. 52 GPU-Z 0. 4. 5 Benchmarking test results The results are a bit of confusion, because the result in 3D Mark 06 is about the same that I get in my review of the Gigabyte GTX 285, and the results of Light Mark FurMark, and well among the results of the GTX 285 card.

GAMING TEST RESULTS

The results from the test with the first group of games clearly shows that the 4890 isn’t able to reach the high results which I had with the GTX 285 but considering the price difference the result is still very competitive. Real test results II very small increase in the frequencies of the GPU and memory, which I received in my overclocking attempts led to an improvement of 1 or 2 fps in real situations of the game of life. In 3D Mark 06, I got a 300 point improvement which is a rather big improvement considering how little it was possible to overclock the card. Conclusion Currently, the Radeon HD 4890 is no longer the most powerful GPU graphics card from AMD-ATI. With the release of the HD 5800 series, the prices of the HD 4800 series models have been reduced considerably, reason why it is a wonderful opportunity to acquire one of these cards.

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