Summary: Can the price reduced AMD RV790 GPU (Radeon HD 4890) be an interesting alternative now when all focus is on AMD’s recently launched HD 5800 series?.

INTRODUCTION

At the time being, all the spotlights on the market for graphics cards are pointed towards AMD ATI who is in the process of launching a new generation of cards supporting the new DirectX 11 standard. One of these cards is the AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 which we have loads of reviews of at testseek.com, go and check out.

However, when a new generation of cards is introduced, one can often make a bargain 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.

For a long time the HD 40xx series from AMD was topped out with the HD 4870 model, but as nVidia pushed on, AMD decided to put out a boosted version of that card 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 we take a look at the specifications you should know that Sapphire has released many different versions of the HD 4890. The one which I will review here is the “Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB GDDR5 PCIe 21150-00-40R ”:

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.

Inside the box I found the card in an antistatic plastic bag which was placed between some black foam plastic protecting the card. 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.

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 4890 IN DETAIL

The card is really more or less the same as AMD ATI’s reference card, it has the same heatsink/cooling solution and the frequencies of the memory and GPU are the ones recommended by AMD. Sapphire also has customized models with a greater amount of memory, specialized cooling solutions and overclocked memory and GPUs.

The card is thick, it occupies 2 slots, basically because of the great size of the heatsink/fan which is made of copper and incorporates several heat pipes to secure a better cooling performance. The fan has a diameter of 70 mm, which is common with AMD cards.

The length (240mm) of the card is also considerable which is pretty normal these days with high en cards. 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 voluminous cooling solution leaves very few details in view, but we can see that Sapphire uses solid condensers, which should assure stable power feeding and a long lived card. 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 connectors consists of a metal grid on the upper part, to favor the air flow. The lower part holds two DVI connectors and one HDTV exit.

INSTALLING THE TEST EQUIPMENT

OK, so for this review I used the following test system:

The below images shows screenshots of the hardware and the configuration:

In all tests I used the highest possible graphics setting. I did tests with filters both on and off.

BENCHMARKING TEST RESULTS

The results are a little confusing to me because in 3D Mark 06 the result is about the same which I obtained in my review of the Gigabyte GTX 285, whereas the results from Lightmark and Furmark are clearly below the results obtained with 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 RESULTS OF TEST II

The second group holds the most demanding games on the market today. As expected the results dropped somewhat with these games. Generally, all games were perfectly playable in the highest resolutions even when applying filters, except for Weapon 2 and Far Cry 2 in which I had to lower the resolution or graphic quality settings to make the games enjoyable to play.

OVERCLOCKING AND COOLING

Finally, it’s time to see what this card is really capable of. One must consider that the HD 4890 is really an overclocked 4870 card to begin with.

It was with a bit of a disappointment that I had to conclude that the most I could overclock this card was a meager 30MHz for the GPU core and 15MHz for the memories.

In order to measure the temperatures of the card I resorted to push the card to the max for a session of 30 minutes with Furmark.  I compared this to another measurement when the computer had been in idle mode for 30 minutes.

As you can see from the image above, there’s a rather big difference between idle mode and full load, which should be expected. In full mode the card is quite noisy, but I still feel there’s been an improvement compared to other high end cards I have tested recently. In idle mode the noise doesn’t bother me at all.

RESULTS OF OVERCLOCKING

The very small increase in GPU and memory frequencies which I received in my over clocking attempts resulted in an improvement of 1 or 2 fps in real life gaming situations. 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.

CONCLUSIONS

At present, the Radeon HD 4890 is no longer is the most powerful graphics-GPU 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.

With this card, Sapphire demonstrates why they are considered as one of the top graphic cards assemblers. I am mostly impressed by the card’s bundle and its price/performance ratio. The card is sold for around 150 Euros ()

Pros:

• General quality
• Rich bundle
• Good price/performance ratio
• Rather cool and silent

Cons:

• Almost no overclocking possible

The final score is 90 out of 100 owls, and we give the “Sapphire Radeon HD 4890″ our Editor’s Choice Award.

Thanks goes out to Sapphire for letting me review this card.

Author: Manuel González Fernández

Translator: Vince Emiloz Sanderson