His Radeon 4890 Video Card

Alright today we are looking at the HIS 4890, very nice video card. Very much like the 4870 but not at the same time. It's really weird actually, the same GPU almost as the RV770, this is the RV790. They changed the number, our producer is shocked at this aberrant change in numbers but it's pretty much the same, it's a 55nm and it makes me wonder how do they get it so much faster because they did actually increase those frequencies a lot. A 4870 clocks in at 750 megahertz with the GPU and the ALUs, this is an 850 megahertz, so they jumped 100 megahertz. This is kind of like XOC Black edition territory from the 4870, stuff that you weren't planning on seeing until now and here's the 4890 so it does do it. Now let's talk a little bit about some the stuff that it comes with before we get into the specs and the frequencies and the benchmarks. First of all what it does do, it has DirectX 10.0 and DirectX 10.1, new DirectX so 10.1 is very good. You do see an increase in your frames per second if you do the DirectX 10.1. Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL 3.0 which is new as well. You get UVD which will let you do 1080P, and blu-rays and stuff with HDCP support and HDMI support. The HDMI support will do 7 channel lossless audio through your converter which comes in the box so HDMI on one end, DVI on the other. It's a DVI, it's a digital one so it's an I, not dual-link though. You also get a DVI to DSub 15-pin VGA connection. You get your Crossfire bridge, which you will be using, this does support Crossfire. And you get a couple of dongles, or throw away, breakout cables, whatever you want to call them. This one's s-video to component, this will do 1080I with no sound. This is a composite, this s-video to composite RCA, this will do video with no sound and this a 6-pin PCI Express E to two 4-pin molex connectors. So that's what comes in the box, besides that you have ATI PowerPlay which is really nice. What that does is pretty much underclock the card when you're doing low-power tootie stuff that's why it's more efficient. As you can see right here, this is where your Crossfire bridge is going to go. It is PCI Express 2.0 x16, it will work with the old-school PCI Express as long as that's 16 lanes of electronic traffic, not a problem. Nice cooler, it's clear, it's a little bit different than the last cooler but very very similar. The heat pipes, you can see them are over in here. See them, there's three of them, they've shifted it. It is a dual slot design, you have two dual-link DVIs on the back. Those will do 2560 by 1600, multiple monitor support. Those are powered by dual 400 megahertz RAMDACs and of course that's 7-pin s-video in the middle right there. Now let's talk a little bit about everything else. Memory on here, you get 1 gigabyte of GDDR5 which is very fast, 3900 megahertz effective because it's quad-pumped so you divide by 4, that's 975 megahertz clock rate. Your ALUs are clocked at 850 megahertz, your core is clocked at 850 megahertz. You get 40 texture units, you get 16 ROPs or Raster Operators and it's a 256-bit interface for that GDDR5 so very very nice and again it's still is 55 nm but it's very efficient. It's very tweakable and it's very overclockable. Next let's get into the benchmarks. 3 games: Far Cry 2, Crysis Warhead and Fallout 3. 22 inch resolution, 24 inch resolution, 1680 by 1050 and 1920 by 1200. Pretty much everything cranked up to max except on Crysis, I will tell you the game settings when I get to each game in particular. The system was a 965 with a 4 gigahertz Core i7, 1866 megahertz Corsair at 1600, 7-7-7-24 1T, 2x 25Ms in RAID 0 with Vista Ultimate 64-bit. What else? That card and also the GTX 260 and the 4870. Let's get to the benchmarks. First game Far Cry 2, this game the 4890 was not very happy with it, it did not like to play this game. This is very very very NVidia-based. It has a huge advantage for using NVidia architectures so just to be fair you know, I'll show both sides of the story. Far Cry 2 the GTX 260 at 22 inch resolution did 51 frames per second. The 4890 did 43 so a drop of 8 frames per second. At 1920 by 1200 the 260 did 45 and the 4890 did 38 so again you drop about 7 frames per second but let's get some good news up in here. Crysis Warhead, this is with DirectX 10, gamer settings, no AA, no AFs so no eye candy. It will destroy just about any card when you crank those up to max. The GTX 260 at 22 inch resolution did 42 frames per second, it got destroyed by the 4890 at 45 frames per second. The 1920 by 1200 the 260 did 34 frames per second, again destroyed by the 4890 at 36 frames per second and here is the most impressive game of all, Fallout 3, game of the year. 8x, AA, ultra high settings, HDR on, fully maxed out, 22 inch resolution. The GTX 260 did 63 frames per second, the 4890 did 73 frames per second, absolutely decimating the NVidia card by 10 frames per second on Fallout 3 which is one of my favorite games. Boy do I love that game. Moving on to 1920 by 1200 the GTX 260 did 47 frames per second, the 4890 did 65 frames per second so an 8 frame per second increase. Again decimated it, destroyed it, very very nice benchmarks. Now another thing I'll talk to you about real quick is the fact that this card is extremely overclockable. So it's an 850 factory, 750 was the 4870, this will go to about 925, 940 is what I got this card to go up to overclocking so very, very good benchmarks from overclocking. Really good stuff, lots of headroom and very tweakable. Runs on very little power, less power than the 4870 even though it's got higher frequencies, again that's the ATI PowerPlay software that it comes with. But besides that really really great card. This is the HIS 4890, cool stuff, good stuff in the box. If you have any questions on it email me and I'll see you guys next time. For more information on the HIS 4890 graphics card type in H231-4890 into the search engine of any of these major retailers. For ComputerTV, I'm Al. (C) 2008 SYX Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved Channel: TigerDirectBlog