But faced by an economy in recession, it could be smarter to refine the products you have than to design and produce new ones. And this is the basis for our introduction, and the concept behind AMD's business strategy for the discrete graphics market. Which raises this question, should a video card manufacturer improve and perfect their current products, or should they rather spend money they can't spare on a new design? AMD has decided to hone the RV770 GPU and offer the RV790 chipset as a result, while the competition is pledging itself to expensive and unnecessary ultra high-end products for a shrinking market. And ASUS is ready to jump on the wagon with their version. - Benchmark Reviews

ASUS Extreme AH4890 TOP 1GB Card Design Review

So what are you expecting the Radeon HD 4890 version to look like? If you didn't have any high hopes for a new design, you'll be fine. The reinvented RV770 found in the Radeon HD 4800 series video cards is now calling itself the RV790 and lives in the Radeon HD 4890. If you weren't given more details about it, the video card could be mistaken for a polished-up Radeon HD 4870, but mistakes aren't allowed at this level so we'll have to put our faith into AMD and presume there's more to it for now. But are there really differences? The ASUS Radeon HD 4890 cannot be denied its roots, because differences are rather negligible.

ATI originally designed their Radeon HD 4870 with a balanced blend of value and performance, and the Radeon HD 4890 rebuffs the performance while keeping an eye on value. Now their third generation 55nm RV790 chip uses the industry's most energy efficient manufacturing process and just adds an additional three million transistors, which allows ATI's latest and greatest single chip graphics card to achieve top level gaming performance while being more energy efficient at idle. Featuring the industries only major implementation of GDDR5 video frame buffer memory, the RV790 graphics processor is allowed to operate under stress.

Beginning with their performance rating, our expectations for the ASUS Radeon HD 4890 during gaming operation were thoroughly exceeded. While the Extreme AH4890 TOP could be considered the most powerful single GPU video card on the planet, that claim will depend on variables like factory overclocked speeds. And given our benchmark results, the factory overclocked Extreme AH4890 TOP often times exceeded frame rate performance of our overclocked GeForce GTX 285. If both operated at stock speed, the results would be very similar. Judging the product appearance is a very subjective matter, but it looks impressive.

In conclusion, their ATI Radeon HD 4890 is exactly what consumers have wanted for more than a year, ultra high performance that costs less than the competition. AMD did it to Intel just back when they launched the Athlon processor, seriously beating in both performance and price. Now AMD returns to put NVIDIA back in line, and offers the Radeon HD 4890 to compete against the GeForce GTX 285 but at a much lower price. Now we have checked out the Radeon HD 4890, and on paper it looks to perform exactly like a heavily overclocked Radeon HD 4870 might, but there's a lot more value in this product than first meets the eye.