The launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 4890 graphics card has been followed by partners trying to overshine each other through factory overclocks and third party coolers. AMD’s new flagship is a card for enthusiasts and manufacturers are doing everything in their power to stand out. AMD’s reference model of Radeon HD 4890 sports 850MHz GPU frequency, but many have chosen to overclock to 900MHz and some even to 950MHz. Sapphire has raised the bar further with its Radeon HD 4890 ATOMIC.
The graphics card use Sapphire’s Vapor-X cooling that will cool better than the reference but also enable factory overclocking. This is far from enough to stand out, but for the first time we have a graphics card in stores with a GPU clocked at 1GHz.
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 ATOMIC ships with 1GHz GPU clock and GDDR5 memory operating at 4200MHz. The graphics processor frequency is impressive, not just because some HD 4890 cards can’t even reach these frequencies, but because overclocking the GPU is where you will gain the most performance with these cards.
Sapphire has most likely raised the voltage a bit to achieve this, which is sort of shown by the 8 pin and 6 pin power connectors, the reference card has two 6 pin connectors. The card should appear in the week to come.
