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Review: Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 XT and XFX Radeon HD 4890 OC XXX vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

by Tarinder Sandhu on 2 April 2009, 05:00 3.7

Tags: Radeon HD 4890 XT 1GB (Sapphire) 9.4, AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire, ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), XFX (HKG:1079), PC

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaroh

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Radeon HD 4890 XT and OC - how they compare

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi

Today, the single-GPU Radeon king, HD 4870, is being supplanted by another card, the Radeon HD 4890 1,024MB. The nomenclature indicates that it's of the same generation and family as the '70, which it is, and it can be thought of, quite accurately, as a faster-clocked Radeon HD 4870.

We'd normally be moved to write volumes on a 'new' GPU, but the differences between Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4890 are few and far between. Let's replace verboseness with a table:

Graphics cards ATI Radeon HD 4870  ATI Radeon HD 4890 XT ATI Radeon HD 4890 Overclocked
Codename
RV770 RV790 RV790
Process (nm)
55 55 55
Transistors (mn)
~956 ~959 ~959



GPU clock (MHz)
750 850 900
Shader clock (MHz) 750 850 900
Memory clock (MHz) 3,600
3,900 3,900
Memory sizes (MB)
512, 1,024, 2,048
1,024 1,024
Memory bus width (bits)
256 256 256



Shader units 800 800 800
ROPs 16 16 16



Idle board power (watts) 90 60 60
Max board power (watts) 160 190 190




Etail price (£) £150 (512MB), £170 (1,024MB) £199+ £225+

Analysis

There will actually be two new Radeon GPUs released today, differentiated on core speed and nothing else. A look at the vital statistics reveals that the Radeon HD 4890 XT - that's the 'regular' version, folks - will ship with an 850MHz core/shader speed and GDDR5 memory operating at 3,900MHz. Further, it will be equipped with a 1,024MB frame-buffer alone; there's no other option at launch. We've already seen a slew of partner-overclocked Radeon HD 4870 1GBs, usually hitting 800MHz core and 4,000MHz RAM, so the introduction of RV790 will render them moot unless pricing drops massively.