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Looks as though Novatech wasn't kidding when it "accidentally" announced that stock of AMD's Radeon HD 4890 would be arriving March 24th.

The yet-to-be-announced GPU has been making its way around the internet and has already had its GPU pictured, its specification revealed, its pricing established at around £230 for PowerColor's 1GB model, and its overclocking prowess shown off, too.

Further making a mockery of AMD's upcoming launch plans is notorious Novatech forum administrator, GIBBO. With stock presumably landing in Novatech's offices, he has taken the time to compare benchmarks of a Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card with a "can't say what this is" mysterious card - no prizes for guessing its name.

Using a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor, an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard, 3GB of DDR2 memory and Samsung SSD drives, he achieved the following benchmark results:

No real surprises, and, as expected, the so-called "mysterious" card is clearly quicker than a 512MB Radeon HD 4870 - and it's packing plenty of overclocking promise, too. In percentage terms, the system featuring the stock-clocked Radeon HD 4890 1GB scores 3.5 per cent higher in terms of 3DMarks than a system equipped with a Radeon HD 4870 512MB.

Looking at GPU performance alone, 3DMark Vantage illustrates that the Radeon HD 4890 1GB performs nearly 12 per cent quicker than the Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Overclock the card, and the performance gap can rise to a whopping 30 per cent.

Given Novatech's expected arrival of a PowerColor card, we'd venture to guess that the benchmarked part could very well be PowerColor's Radeon HD 4890 1GB. We can't, of course, attest to the reliability of the benchmarks, but despite the seemingly endless number of leaks relating to this GPU, rest assured that our official verdict - complete with our full suite of benchmarks - will be published once AMD officially launches the card.

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