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Alright, today we're looking at the Extreme Edition from XFX.
Now, there's quite a few video cards from XFX right now, if you want to take a look.
This is the standard 4890. So, this is the standard.
And this is the Extreme Edition. This is the middle ground, and this is the beginner.
And the big dog in the family, which not everybody wants to purchase
is the *** Edition, which comes in the really cool box, that you can see at the top
of this stack. That is the fastest clocked 4890 that SFX has so far.
But the good news is that this one down here can overclock almost as far as the ***.
And it definitely, it will overclock past the ***, but it won't overclock as far
as the ***. If you overclock the ***, it won't go as far as this one,
but this one will go at least as far as the ***, which is awesome.
So, you don't know about the card. The 4890 is pretty much a 4870.
It's still a 55nm, it's just got a better GPU that can overclock better.
It has better power efficiency with new software.
And drivers that ATI introduced. And, it's just a little bit better, overall.
It's more tweakable, it's more overclockable.
It can actually overclock quite impressively. It's one of the best things about this.
The RV790, some of them can go over 1 Ghz.
I got the *** to 980 MHz, and I got this one to 967 MHz, which is very, very high
for a Core Clock. Really, really, really good stuff on here.
Now, frequencies on this, on a 4870, you're looking at 750 MHz on the Core Clock.
The standard 4890, like this one over here, that one is 850 MHz.
This one right here is 875 MHz Core Clock. GPU's, the shaders are also
going to be at 875 MHz. The memory is at 975 MHz which is quad pumped
because it's GDDR5. So that's operating at 3900 MHz effective.
You have 1 GB, or 1024 MB of GDDR3.
You got 40 texture units and you got 16 ROPs. Alright?
So lots of good stuff. Let me move these out of the way real quick.
So we can make sure we know which one we are concentrating on,
which is this one, right here. Now, let's continue.
Now, just like the 4870, you got all their other good stuff.
You got DirectX 10.1. You got Shader Model 4.1.
But what's interesting about this is it's the first one to use OpenGL 3.0.
So you got a lot of good stuff there. Everything else is the same.
You got UVD. So if you want to do, it's a Unified Video Decoder,
if you want to do Bluerays, or 1080p HD content off the web, you can do that.
You also get all the good stuff you need. So you have HDMI support,
which will do 7.1 channel lossless audio, through an HDMI cable.
So they, in fact, give you this, pretty much an HDMI to DVI dongle.
And it will do 7.1 channel lossless audio through there using HDCP
and HDMI support, which is really nice. They also give you, in case you're
kind of old school, you got these. These are, pretty much, the component breakaways,
and composite breakaways. So to an old 480p television.
This is a 1080i, and of course the HDMI to DVI will do 1080p,
which is 1920 x 1080p progressively scanned with 7.1 channel lossless audio.
Also, for you old school guys, you get an old school DVI to VGA 15-pin D-Sub.
You get your CrossFire bridge, of course, because you can't run these in CrossFire.
And you also get these adapters for molex to PCI Express 6-pin and there's two of them.
Two 6-pin PCI Express Connectors is what you will need.
Those go right there. I recommend about a 500 watt with a high quality power supply.
If you have a low quality power supply, maybe a little more, but you should be fine
with 500. I ran two of these with a 500 watt Corsair PSU, no problem,
which is actually pretty impressive, I'd say. I liked that a lot.
Now, talking about overclocking. Again, this thing had a really high core.
The memory got to 4 GHz, which was really impressive.
It was actually a little bit over, like 1005 was the memory that it overclocked to.
Using the ATI control panel, also you get the AMD Fusion expert profile.
Or the AMD Fusion program, which what that does is it shuts down all the background
processes which are running. So if you want your computer to go a little faster,
it will shut down everything. Now, we did do some benchmarks and in those benchmarks
we used the Expert Profile, which is the most extreme one.
That one actually cuts out the most programs, the most memories from the background.
It's going to let your computer go the fastest. It's going to kill all the extra
CPU cycles you're not using. And, let's talk about some of those benchmarks.
We were using the Catalyst 9.4 Drivers.
Pretty much using the AMD Fusion Expert Profile.
The system is a Core i7 965 at 4 GHz.
Memory is 1866 MHz Corsair clocked at 1600 MHz.
77724 with the one T command line, where the latency is 2X25Ms
in RAID 0, Vista 64-bit, with service back to, pretty much,
the basic system, and that's what we did.
Alright, now looking at these benchmarks. First of all, first game I did
was Tom Clancey HAWX, because it happens to be the game that comes with it.
So, if you look right here, yup, there it is, Tom Clancy HAWX, new game.
It's a flight sim, it's a combat flight sim by Ubisoft.
Very nice game. I did 1680 x 1050, and 1920 x 1200, versus the 4890,
the 4870 and the GTX 260 all of those against the ***.
Now, these are the highest settings. Everything maxed out, DirectX 10.1.
For the latest DirectX 10.1, I did see a frame,
an SPF increase by going to DirectX 10.1 versus 10.
So you definitely want to use it if you have the ability to. If your card supports it.
If the game supports it, you definitely want to use it.
Everything else was maxed out. 16XAF, 4XAA and we get back to see
67 frames per second at 1680 x 1050.
And we got to see 50 frames per second on 1920 x 1200.
Just to give you an idea, the GTX 260 did 54 frames at 22'' resolution,
and only 37 frames at 24'' resolution. Moving on to Far Cry 2.
Far Cry 2 is a huge advantage for NVIDIA video based games, or cards.
So we saw 51 frames per second on the GTX 260, and only 45 fps
on the 4890 OC, or this is the Extreme Edition.
So, definitely not as fast, but it is that one particular game.
It is, you know, definitely an NVIDIA based game.
At 1920 x 1200 it did 40 frames per second, compared to the 45 frames per second
of the GTX 260. Still, all maxed out settings.
Those are still great performers. And that's on a game that's very biased towards
the NVIDIA architecture. Moving on to Crysis Warhead,
this game Direct X10, Gamers' Setting, no AA, no AF.
Pretty much had to minimize stuff down because that game will bring
any video card to its knees. Very, very powerful game.
The GTX 260 managed to get 42 frames per second at 22''.
The 4870 did 40 fps, the 4890 did 44 fps.
This card did 45 fps. So, that 25 MHz increase in the Core in the GPU
did a little bit. At 1920 x 1200 it got 37 frames per second, which is really good.
It also, compared to the GTX 260, which only got 34 frames,
you get a good 3 frame bump. Fallout3, game of the year,
at 1680 x 1050 did 76 frames per second,
completely destroying the GTX 260, which only did 63 frames per second.
At 1920 x 1200 it got 68 frames per second. That's almost 70 frames per second
on a 24'' monitor with everything maxed out. That shows you how powerful this card is,
compared to the GTX260 which did 47 fps, and even the 4870 which only did 57 fps.
So, very impressive benchmarks. As you can tell, the card is very, very fast.
The price point is pretty good. It's kind of hurting the...
It's helping the 4870 a little bit because the 4870 is going to go down in price.
It's going to be a great bank for buck. This card is still going to be awesome, as well.
A little more expensive, but really great stuff.
4890, very fast, great benchmarks, great efficiency and very, very high frequency.
Getting that Core to 1 GHz is, very impressive.
That's what we were trying to see with the 4870.
What was it called? The XOC Black Edition, a long time ago?
That did not work out. That did not even get to like, 850 before.
Not even, I think it got to like 800 before it crashed.
This thing will go to 1 GHz, if you are lucky.
If you get that magical card that overclocks to the limit,
and you have a good watercooling, you could overclock these 4890's higher.
But, even in Factory Form, 875 MHz is very, very fast for these RV790 chips.
So, good stuff. 4890, if you have any questions on it, Email me.
And I'll see you guys next time. For more information on
the XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme Edition Video Card,
type in: P450-4892
into the search engine of any of these major retailers.
For Computer TV, I'm Albert.
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