Sapphire was one of the first to be revealed working on a 1GHz version of AMD’s new Radeon HD 4890 graphics card and after we recently revealed that XFX HD4890 Black Edition is shipping out to European stores with a GPU clock frequency of 1GHz Sapphire has officially launched its Atomic model. The graphics circuit is, from factory, clocked at 1GHz and the GDDR5 memory has been pushed to 4200MHz.
The great achievement is certainly the overclock of the Radeon HD 4890 GPU and it can’t have come easy for Sapphire. Sapphires Atomic model sports a more efficient cooler, which isn’t really all that odd since the voltage has been tuned up quite a bit.
Hexus.net has published a first review and even if it doesn’t mention the specific GPU voltage we have received information stating that Sapphire is using 1.5V to reach 1GHz, which is a lot more than the 1.3V the reference cards uses.
That Sapphire has managed to push the 4890 circuit beyond average is without doubt but in the overclocking tests performed by Hexus they only managed to get another 20MHz from the core.
Despite the clock frequencies and higher voltages temperatures and power consumption are kept at reasonable levels. The question is if it is worth the extra $50 compared to “regular” overclocked Radeon HD 4890 cards.
