The Radeon HD 4890 is an interesting board, but we haven't heard loads about it and the general excitement about the card is quite low. But the main reason we think people aren't that excited is because both they and we know that the card isn't going to be as fast as the dual GPU wielding GeForce GTX 295. And this is what most people want, especially when the Radeon HD 4800 series cards have been out for so long. The Radeon HD 4890 though should do what ATI does best lately, offer good performance at a pretty good price. The board wasn't due to be released, but due to NVIDIA having the GeForce GTX 275 coming out a few days earlier, the launch date for this card has been moved forward. - TweakTown

Gigabyte Radeon HD 4890 1GB Version Card Preview

Having a look at the package, we can see that Gigabyte hasn't done anything new with it. We've been seeing this particular design from them for a while. Most of the box is taken up by a picture of a girl and across the bottom we have the model mentioned along with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. So across the top we have the Gigabyte and ATI logo's, while below that we have mention of a free HDMI adapter and finally we see that the card carries GDDR5 memory. Turning the box over, we have a bit of blurb on the model. And moving down from there, we have mention of some of the features that the graphics card includes.

Having a look at the Radeon HD 4890 for the first time, there isn't really anything new to see. What you ultimately notice is that the card looks very similar to the Radeon HD 4870 that has been out for a while now. The particular cooler is the reference one that we will see most Radeon HD 4890 video cards using at the moment. Of course, Gigabyte has added its own sticker to the card which shows the brand and model. When we have a look around the card it doesn't come as much of a surprise that there isn't much different between the Radeon HD 4890 and the Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards, which was actually expected.

Compared to the Radeon HD 4870, we see that the Radeon HD 4890 gives us a nice boost in performance. Having a look at the other cards however, and the picture isn't so clear. Compared to the GeForce GTX 265 the performance is a bit up and down, depending on the game. We know that the card isn't designed to compete against the GeForce GTX 285 in the performance department, this is known because NVIDIA is releasing a GeForce GTX 275 to battle the Radeon HD 4890 which is going to come in cheaper than their GeForce GTX 285 version, as you would expect and which as such will be a tough battle.

It's nice to see that come launch day Gigabyte has offered an overclocked card with an extra few MHz on the core and memory. As for the bundle, we've got everything we need and while it would have been nice to see a full version game in the bundle, it doesn't come as a surprise that Gigabyte hasn't included one. We're seeing more and more companies not include a game to help keep costs down. Pricing is going to be the most important aspect of this card, we should see the Radeon HD 4890 come in at around the $250 mark and this is a bit more expensive than the GeForce GTX 260, but this is also a launch price.

Deciding which board to buy is going to be a tough one and the performance between the two are a bit all over the place. What you do get with the ATI offering though, is regular driver updates and with the Radeon HD 4890 being the most recent card from ATI there's no doubt that this is going to be the main card that the Catalyst driver team concentrates on for a while to come.