Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Alright, check it out. Sapphire sent us the 4890.
The successor to the 4870.
That used the RV 770 GPU, this uses the 790 GPU.
It's still 55nm, it's mostly the same, but it's clocked much faster.
How they did it, I don't know. It's anyones guess.
But they did make it faster, and they made it more power efficient
without doing a die shrink, so it's really weird,
but it ends up being good for you because you get more performance,
you get high frequencies, and just to give you an idea,
a 4870 is a 750 MHz core clock and a 750 MHz ALU clock,
this is 850 MHz on the GPU, and it's 850 MHz on the shaders,
so a 100 MHz extra, and it over clocks.
It's got tons of head room that will go past 900.
This one in particular, I got the 970,
very very high over clock. It did run hot,
I had everything maxed out at 100%, but it ran well,
and the memory went above 4.3 GHz, which is very fast.
Now, factory clock, this is a 3900 MHz card for the memory.
It is 1GB, or 1024 MB, of GDDR5.
It's quad pumped, so it's about 975 regular,
effective is 3900, and it will go above 4 GHz effective if you over clock it,
so it's really good. Let's talk about the card itself.
Pretty. Clear. Dual slot cooler.
It's got a couple heat pipes, you'll notice over here on the inside,
you can see it, there are three heat pipes there,
going in, it is a dual slot cooler.
You got two dual-link DVIs,
they will do 2560 X 1600 lines of resolution,
using a dual-link DVI i cable.
They are powered by dual 400 MHz RAM backs.
You have an s-video output, right there, 7-pin.
Included in the box are some useful attachments for that 7-pin,
it's a component breakaway, so it will do 1080i with no audio.
You also get a composite breakaway. This will do 480p with no audio.
Also included in the box is an HDMI to DVI,
as well as a VGA to... VGA dsub 15 to DVI.
So you'll use that to. But this is going to be your best option.
This is the HDMI. Now, what's really cool about this
HDMI in particular, especially on this card,
is that it has UVD, or unified video decoder,
that will give you 7.1 channel lossless audio, through the HDMI cable,
as well as 1920 X 1080p, progressively scanned,
through one cable very very easily.
It will also do HDCP, so you'll have high bandwith digital content protection,
so you can do blu-rays and 1080p stuff off the web,
HD DVDs, you name it, it will do it, which is really really great.
Another thing that is cool about this card is it's not normal,
it's got a couple cool things, first of all Directx 10.1,
instead of just Directx 10, you do get just a few frames per second just by doing that.
You also have Shader Model 4.1. And, even newer than that,
OpenGL 3.0, which is brand spanking new, really good stuff there.
You do have the UVD, which is really cool on the HDMI output with the HDCP.
You have ATI PowerPlay, which is how they're saving power.
This video card will actually under clock itself while you are doing nothing.
If you're just sitting there and it's in 2D mode,
you're on your desktop, it will under clock itself,
it will lower the memory frequencies, it will the GPU and the shader frequencies,
and in turn you will use less power, it will power it on the fan as well,
to make it quiet, so that's really nice,
that's good stuff as well.
It does support CrossFire X,
and you do have a CrossFire bridge, and if you don't know how to use that
pretty much you get two video cards and you plug this here,
and the other one goes to the other video card,
and now you have two video cards worth of power, which is really great.
Now, let's talk a little bit about bench marks
because I did some for this card. Three games, two resolutions,
24 inch data resolution X 1200, and 1680 X 1050 22 inch resolution,
the machine is a 965 at 4GHz, Corsair memory at 1600 MHz,
777 241T, two X25s,
loaded with Vista Ultimate 64 in RAID 0,
that graphics card,
and Catalyst 9.4 drivers using the AMD Fusion on the expert profiles
that shuts down the background processes.
That was a fresh install so it wasn't that much of a help.
But here we go, starting off with Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X,
this is versus the GTX 260 and a 4870. The GTX 260 at 22 to 54,
for the 4870 to 57, and the 4890 to 63,
so a nice increase of 9 frames per second, that's huge.
Great stuff. And 1920 X 1200 24 inch native resolution,
the GTX 260 did 37, the 4890 did 49,
12 frames per second, huge jump, decimated the competition.
That was at 16XAF4XAA all settings to the highest,
Directx 10.1, so pretty much maxed out.
Here's Crisis Warhead Directx 10, gamer settings,
no AA, no AF, as simple as it gets,
but it's still not bottom settings almost the highest settings you can go to.
1680 X 1050 42 fps for the GTX 260,
the 4890 did 44 fps, beat it by two fps,
which even though we know the Crisis Warhead is definitely
kind of, meant for video architecture, it does get a boost by using video cards,
so it still beat it even with that disadvantage.
Moving on to 1920 X 1200, 34 fps for the 260.
The ATI card, the 4890 did 35 fps second,
so you got one frame, no big deal.
Fallout 3, game of the year, one of my favorites,
incredible incredible benchmarks, it destroyed the Nvidia card in this game,
8X AA, ultra high settings, HDR on pretty much maxed out,
actually everything maxed out, not pretty much.
At 22, the 260 did 63 fps,
the 4890 did 72 fps, (whistle) 9 frames per second, destroyed it.
1920 X 1200, the 269 did 47 fps,
the 4890 did 64, again that's like six of seven fps,
very very nice benchmarks, very very fast card,
lots of good stuff on here. It is the Sapphire 4890 from ATI.
It's HD Radeon series, part of the 4800 series, the RV790.
Very over clockable, very tweekable,
great new drivers, lots of good support,
OpenGL 3.0, Directx 10.1, very nice as well,
so good stuff. Good card.
If you have any questions on it email me,
and I will see you guys next time.
For more information on the Sapphire 4890 graphics card
type in A271-4890
into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For Computer TV, I'm Albert.
(C) 2008 SYX Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved Channel: TigerDirectBlog