The 1 GB Radeon HD 4890 takes up the baton from the 1 GB HD 4870. From the same generation, they share the same architecture. The difference comes from the higher clocks on the 4890. Enough to worry NVIDIA with its GeForce GTX 275 and 285? See below for the answer.

The 4890 is positioned as a high-end single chip card. We therefore focus our analysis on high res (1920x1200 pixels) with filters activated. In terms of  overall performance it's at a similar level to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 275 and 285. Nevertheless in practice there can be fairly large differences in favour of one card or another depending on the games used in testing.


The first concrete example is with Company of Heroes. This game suits the NVIDIA cards well and they give significantly better performance than the ATIs. In our test scene, the Radeon HD 4890 gives an average framerate of 58 fps (frames per second), while the GeForce GTX 275 and 285 give 78 and 84 fps respectively. With Race Driver GRID however, the Radeon obtains 88 fps on average compared to 77 and 75 fps for its two competitors. It’s a draw with Fallout 3 where we got an average of 68 fps for the 4890 and the GTX 275 and 67 fps for the GTX 285. It is worth looking at our results in depth to get a more thorough idea. You can take a look at the different readings obtained in the graphics card face-off.

In any case this Radeon gives fluid results for all current titles (excepting Crysis which is still a bit of a UFO when it comes to gaming) at high resolutions both with and without filters activated. It also gives a 10% gain in performance on average on the 1 GB Radeon HD 4870, its immediate predecessor.

Size, energy consumption and noise

The 4890 is 23.5 cm long. It is therefore in the category of medium-sized cards. Make sure that your casing is large enough to house it, especially as the original heatsink takes up two spaces on the motherboard. You’ll need two 6 pin PCI-Express cards for the power supply. In terms of energy consumption, results are mitigated. In 3D it’s pretty good, with a reading of 342W compared to 382 and 384W on the GeForce GTX 275 and 285 respectively. ATI must however make more of an effort in 2D as we measured it at 151W as against 118 and 122W on the other two models.

The heatsink itself is not completely convincing. A double decker, it keeps the card temperature down ok: 58° in 2D and 77° in 3D. This is however achieved at the expense of a fair amount of noise: in idle the card is at 38.4 dB(A), already quite perceptible and 56.7 dB(A) in 3D! A veritable turbine then that is very disturbing for all those in the room.