In the war without end between the video card manufacturers, the leader of the pack is determined as much by how many levels of the market they can hit as it is by the manufacturer who can produce the fastest top end card. ATI has always been good at this, many times managing to have multiple versions of a particular core available at every performance level and price point. However in this latest generation, they didn’t have a card to sit between their top end HD 4870 and the dual-GPU equipped HD 4870X2. What’s worse is that NVIDIA did.
ATI has finally responded with the Radeon HD 4890, and we are taking a look at this new GPU core courtesy of GIGABYTE. Let’s find out how it performs!
Features and Specifications
The Radeon HD 4890 found on the GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B video card, and every other HD 4890 card out there for that matter, is basically an overclocked HD 4870. Some improvements have been made to the core to improve stability and performance, enough so that the code name for this GPU has been revised to RV790 XT, from the the RV770 XT found on the HD 4870. As for GIGABYTE’s version of this card, it doesn’t deviate far from the ATI reference design and specification.
Out of the box it’s clocked at a core speed of 850MHz and a memory speed of 975MHz (3900MHz quad pumped). The card features 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and fully supports CrossFireX and Avivo HD technology. For full features and specifications, check out the product home page.
Now since this isn’t the best of the best, top of the line card from ATI, it doesn’t carry a top of the line price. The honour is reserved for the HD 4870×2, which until the 4890×2 is released is ATI’s performance king. As for buying the GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B card were reviewing here, the price sits right in the middle of the pack with other HD 4890 cards. At a street price of $250 USD, GIGABYTE is targeting this card at those who want to purchase from a reliable vendor without paying a premium for having the card overclocked at the factory.
Is the GIGABYTE card still easy to overclock? And how does it perform? We’ll have to find out after taking a look at the card itself, and the accessories included.
Nice Package You Have There
The collection of accessories included with the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card run the gamut from the expected to a nice surprise. The usual suspects of a DVI-to-VGA adapter, Molex to PCIe convertors, and a component cable adapter are preset. One of the welcome bonuses is the DVI-to-HDMI convertor, which will allow you to hook up a system with this video card to an HDTV or LCD that supports HDMI.
The other added bonus is a little bit of a head scratcher. It comes in the form of a single Crossfire bridge. This is weird because configuring any HD 4890 in Crossfire requires two of these bridges. I guess if you buy another GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B video card this shouldn’t be an issue. On the other hand, if you buy another brand of card that doesn’t include a bridge, you’ll have to go find another one. Most CrossFire ready motherboards do seem to come with said bridges so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
Documentation came in the form of a single, fairly concise user’s manual. The only software included was a drivers disk containing some older drivers and a couple utilities. There weren’t any games included with this package. Guess we’ll just have to install our own for testing. But first we should take a closer look at the card itself.
The Card and Connectors
The GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 video card follows ATI’s reference design for the card extremely closely. It features a dual slot cooling solution that uses a variable speed fan, ensuring quiet cooling when the computer isn’t being fully used and abused. GIGABYTE does add their own little graphic to the top of the cooler, but otherwise the card is ATI reference through and through.
The card is powered by two 6-pin PCIe connectors, plugged into port on the rear edge of the card. The length of this card combined with the position of these ports may cause some problems for those with smaller cases, or cases with a unique configuration. Power stability is handled by the use of solid state Japanese capacitors. This should also help with getting the extra voltage needed for a stable overclock, should you dabble in that dark art.
Plugged In Ports
The ports on the rear of the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card are the same as what you would typically find on any other video card. Two DVI ports are present, as well as an analogue video output. Directly above them is the exhaust vent for the fan and cooling apparatus. GIGABYTE did one unique thing with these ports by applying plastic covers to each of them. Though this doesn’t seem like much, it does protect unused ports from any dust or debris that may turn them into non-working ports.
This idea of dust covers for the ports continues to the Crossfire connectors on the leading edge of the video card. Though these are a nice touch, they only serve to be aesthetically pleasing. It’s nice to block the ports your are using, but the covers you remove from the ports you are using will inevitably get lost. As for the backside of the card, GIGABYTE has decided not to put any heat generated components on it. This makes rear cooling of the card unnecessary, and makes the main cooler easily removable should you want to install some after market cooling.
The Test Rig
To test the GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 video card, I installed it into my current test rig and used the latest drivers from ATI. We also pitted it against the ZOTAC GTX 260 AMP! we reviewed a while back. The reasoning behind this is that the GTX 260 chipset is essentially equivalent to the HD 4870. The HD 4890 is an overclocked HD 4870, and the AMP! Edition an overclock of the standard GTX 260. The match seems natural. Anyhow, here’s the test rig specs.
- AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU
- GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P AM3 790FX Motherboard
- Corsair XMS3 DHX 4GB DDR3-1600 Dual Channel Memory Kit
- ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition Video Card
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB 10000rpm SATA2 Hard Drive
- HighSpeed PC Top Deck Tech Station
- Lian Li MAXIMA Force Extreme PS-A650GB 650W Power Supply
- Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM 24 Inch LCD Monitor
As for actual benchmarks we pretty well focused on gaming, trying to pick the most punishing titles in a particular genre. We brought back 3DMark06 for this review, since there are still some very popular DirectX 9 based titles hanging around. After all the testing is done, we then turn to overclocking to get and idea of how easy this card is to overclock. Let’s go.
Synthetic Benchmarks
It’s always interesting dragging 3DMark 06 out of digital mothballs to see how high a number you can get. Many have posted ridiculous scores in the 25,000 range using various tweaks and turning down the settings for the test. That’s not our goal here. Though we did use mostly default settings, we at least cranked the resolution up to 1920×1200 to match the native resolution of our test rig LCD panel. This produced some interesting results, with scores posted in the 14,000 range. The NVIDIA card we are using for comparison did edge out the GIGABYTE HD 4890, but the margin is less then 1% which makes it a non-issue. You could effectively call this a tie.
While the synthetic DX9 tests essentially ended in a mulligan that’ll require us to dive into some real world tests right away, the DirectX 10 based tests found in 3DMark Vantage produce some more interesting results. Unlike 3DMark06, Vantage has three performance presets to test with. The Extreme test runs at the native resolution of 1920×1200, with the High tests running at 1680×1050 and the Performance tests running at 1280×1024. Both the Performance and High tests put forward some large performance gaps between the NVIDIA hardware and our GIGABYTE review unit, with a gain of 13% and 9% respectively for the GTX 260 AMP!. Extreme mode is where things evened out, showing that the GIGABYTE HD 4890 can hold it’s own better at higher resolutions.
DirectX 9 Testing
The first test in our round of DX9 benchmarks is Call of Duty 4. Though it’s been superseded by Call of Duty: World at War, the newest game uses the same engine and CoD4 still has a large audience of amateur and pro players. As for the game engine, it does have a fair degree of graphical complexity for a DX9 based engine.
All our tests were performed with maximum settings at the two most frequently used wide screen LCD resolutions, and the game never looked more beautiful. Actually it did look more beautiful on the ATI hardware, at least to my eyes. ATI has always held a subjective advantage over NVIDIA in the picture quality department, and the GIGABYTE HD 4890 was no different. The ATI based card just seemed to produce most accurate, realistic looking colours. It also managed to pull ahead slightly of the NVIDIA card, though one again in a statistically near-insignificant manner.
DX9 Zombies Are Still Scary Zombies
Left 4 Dead is the other title chosen for our DX9 benchmarks. This game was just recently released (recently being late last year), but it still manages to get by using the almost 5 year old Source engine. Like id Software in it’s heyday, this just goes to show the longevity of engines produced by Valve. Unfortunately the engine is old enough to not pose a challenge to the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card and it’s competitor. The numbers posted by either card were near perfectly matched.
Left 4 Dead really is the darling of the DX9 world. The game just looks wonderful, especially with everything cranked to max. Our testing consisted of playing back a demo recorded during a versus game consisting of myself, Eric Garay, and the crew from Fragapalooza. I would once again have to give the nod to the ATI hardware, as it just looked better on screen then the NVIDIA based gear.
DirectX 10 Testing
DirectX 10 based games are known for being able to lay brutal beating on graphics hardware, though the true benefit of the results may be questionable. That’s neither here nor there in this review, as we turn to two DX10 games from two different genres to see if we can put some distance between the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card we are reviewing and test bed NVIDIA card. The first game to be benchmarked is World in Conflict. This top down RTS title employs DX10 based graphics to render every unit and explosion in full 3D glory. So how did that all work out?
Not as well as I had hoped. I’m really wanting to see some sort of discernable difference between the GTX 260 I picked for a base unit, and the GIGABYTE HD 4890 we’re reviewing. I guess I picked my test subjects well, as the HD 4890 only just came in behind the overclocked GTX260 in the World in Conflict benchmark.
With all the claims of vastly improved image quality with DX10, the proof wasn’t really in the pudding until Crysis came along. If you could get powerful enough graphics hardware, you could set the game settings so high as to produce scenes that are near indistinguishable from real life. There was actually a screenshot going around the web that showed just this.
So with that in mind, I’m sorry to report that once again the race is a near dead heat between the NVIDIA test card and our ATI HD 4890 based review unit. In this benchmark, the overclocked GTX 260 overtook the HD 4890 by a very slight margin. This was with everything cranked to very high running at the resolutions noted above.
Overclocking
Overclocking may be the one saving grace of the HD 4890. So far the GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 video card that we have been sent to review has been matched evenly with the overclocked ZOTAC GeForce GTX 260 AMP! Edition found in my main rig. However the HD 4890 appears to be quite the tweaker’s card.
ATI’s Overdrive software makes for very easy overclocking, and the results you see above were simply achieved with the the Auto Tune feature. That’s right! I managed this performance increase with just the automatic overclocking tool. With some finesse and a little luck, I’m sure 1GHz GPU core would be achievable on these cards. That and a few more MHz out of the memory clock, and you should be pushing into the performance territory of the GeForce GTX 275 that NVIDIA recently released.
I should note that this was all done with stock cooling. It would be interesting to see what one could do with an after-market cooler or something from the likes of CoolIT.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Like any new video card release, I approached the release of the Radeon HD 4890 and the subsequent GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 video card with cautious optimism and excitement. New video cards are always interesting in their own right, as they are a full of unspoiled potential. They probably sit on the same level as CPUs for the amount of excitement and intrigue they can generate. Now that I’ve had some time with this card, I’m not sure where exactly I stand.
The GIGABYTE HD 4890 is a competent card, and it is the fastest single GPU card in ATI’s stable. That is important if you are dedicated to using ATI hardware, or locked into their architecture due to motherboard and chipset choice. As we just discussed, the card is remarkably tweakable. It even beats out the GTX 260, only being bested by a factory overclocked version in a few of our benchmarks.
Things start to get muddy when you start to consider the price of these cards and how they correlate to their performance. The GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B is a full $60 USD more expensive then the equivalent of the NVIDIA GTX 260 board used for comparison. It’s actually closer to the price of the GTX 275. Now the GIGABYTE card does come with some huge overclocking overhead, and should come close to GTX 275 in performance. That still requires manual tweaking. The card does come with some nice features, but this price comparison is hard to ignore. I mean, if they even managed to throw in a couple games you could balance the cost.
In the end, the GIGABYTE GV-R489-1GH-B Radeon HD 4890 video card is a good start. It’s a welcome entry to the ATI family, and can scratch the tweaking itch of many an overclocker out there. If GIGABYTE can start releasing super-clocked versions at the same price point, I will be remarkably impressed. As it stands now, this card gets a high rating for it’s wonderful performance, but loses some points and an award for it’s price to performance comparison to competing hardware.
Pros
- Excellent performance in high res games
- Nice bonus accessories
- Lots of overclocking headroom
Cons
- No games to give it an edge on price
- Just another reference card with a sticker
Overall Rating: 8.5/10.0
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