Alright time for a refresh, it's almost spring and that's just the season for growing graphics cards. So the Radeon HD 4890 is, for all intensive purposes, a retooled Radeon HD 4870 which in our humble opinion, is overdue. Not that the Radeon HD 4870 was by any means a bad card, and it certainly got its deserved amount of press, but it had its failings and when prices were even we would generally just recommend the GeForce GTX 260 edition. Prices rarely were even, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you like to root for. Although on the pretty good chance that you were getting a Radeon HD 4870 because it was cheaper, it was easy to overlook its major shortcomings from the total view. - TechLounge

Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 OverClock Version Review

It wasn't a quiet card, not that many of its class are, but more to the point it even idled power hungry, and particularly with the 512MB versions didn't like to anti-alias much. Then the one gigabyte refresh came along and made it a little more competitive, right about when NVIDIA started selling the better GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shaders. Once again, it came down to price. AMD doesn't like losing on the price front, that's for damn sure. But it never hurts to have a great high-end card. This board isn't a match for the GeForce GTX 285 or the limited GeForce GTX 295, but it's an outstanding improvement over the Radeon HD 4870.

There are substantive improvements over the Radeon HD 4870 with this design. It seems that the stickers are a lot more minimalistic, with a nearly fully clothed shootist crossing her massive pistols on this product. But if you look closely, the heatsink beneath the sticker has been modified, with three heatpipes over the previous two. Now one fat one in the middle and two regular ones. The card is powered by dual 6-pin auxiliary power connectors, which should allay some fears about its power consumption, although 225W is still a high ceiling. And it seems that most of the samples going out are factory overclocked.

We would consider getting this video card for any mainstream gaming machine. It is priced in a good spot, it's a very even keeled performer, and with regards to the Radeon HD 4870, the Radeon HD 4890 is in almost every way improved. And what we were really looking for was better anti-aliasing and it certainly wins there. For the upgraders out there who already have a Radeon HD 4800 series card, things may very well become a bit more complicated. It's certainly going to provide better gaming, and by no small margin, but it's not like it's going to do anything beyond that. Feature wise, it's right there with all the others.

Because this card's an noname style sample, without a bundle, we're not going to project on pricing too much or anything, and especially with the immediate GeForce GTX 275 competition, but we will say that ATI set out to make a better Radeon HD 4870, and this card is. The only real question for someone in the market is whether or not to go factory overclocked. As if there's a huge amount of doubt, not really as far as we have seen.