Sapphire HD 4890 Review

The fast and furious pace of video card introductions last year has continued into 2009. This time Sapphire and ATI have brought forth the HD 4890 as the new flagship single GPU card in their performance arsenal. With increased clock speeds and performance, this card should offer a substantial increase in performance over the current HD 4870 crop of video cards. Built upon the same architecture as the R770 core, the HD 4890 features the same 800 stream processors and almost one billion transistors. Offering 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 975MHz and the R790 GPU core running at an impressive 850MHz, the HD 4890 looks to be a serious contender for the single GPU crown. Sapphire doesn’t only offer just a stock clocked card. At launch there will be an overclocked card to push the level of performance higher with clock speeds of 901MHz on the GPU core and 1000MHz on the GDDR5 memory. The HD 4890 is not just about raw FPS numbers as it has all the capabilities to make this card a well rounded addition to any system with its High Definition outputs and UVD (Unified Video Decoder). Let’s see if the Sapphire HD 4890 can live up to the performance expectations as the top of the ATI single GPU food chain.

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