As you might have guessed, ATI's new Radeon HD 4890 graphics board is well placed to compete with enthusiast video cards just like their Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the GeForce GTS 260 Core 216 edition, as well as the rather recently released GeForce GTX 275. In terms of performance, the Radeon HD 4890 has the potential to beat all of the above, with its most direct competition coming from the more expensive GeForce GTX 285 graphics card. These are the fastest single GPU cards available on the market today, and are all more than powerful to handle gaming on anything less than a 30inch wide LCD display. For smooth gaming at extreme resolutions, a multi GPU setup is the best option. - PCStats

ASUS Extreme AH4890 1GB Video Card Style Review

Compared to the venerable Radeon HD 4870, ATI's Radeon HD 4890 is more of a GPU refresh than a change in architecture. This means a bump in both core and memory clock speeds to increase overall performance and memory bandwidth, but not a substantial bump in the sticker price that new GPU architectures tend to command. Their RV790 chipsets remains largely the same as the existing Radeon HD 4800 series, both have 800 stream processors and are built on a 55nm process, both have 256-bit memory interfaces and use GDDR5 memory. The Radeon HD 4890 is essentially a highly overclocked Radeon HD 4870 style.

So AMD hasn't missed a beat getting its newest hardware out the door and into stores. The Radeon HD 4890 has arrived on the market less than a year after the RV770 chipset, and its been born into a more competitive graphics card market than ever before. Timing, as they say, is everything. With a core clock speed of 850MHz and a 1GB of onboard memory running at 3900MHz, the ASUS Extreme AH4890 is the fastest clocked member of their Radeon HD 4800 family, with overall performance that sits just below the mighty Radeon HD 4870 X2 version and will certainly replace in time the different Radeon HD 4870 variants.

While NVIDIA of course, has a response ready with its GeForce GTX 275, and both new cards will be converging on the hotly contested $250 price point. Only time and head to head benchmarks will determine who the winner is. ASUS does have one particularly exciting ace up its sleeve with the Extreme AH4890 video card that can't be overlooked. That is superb overclocking, thanks in part to the decent headroom from the newest RV790 GPU and memory, as well as ASUS' adjustable GPU voltage settings. And in fact with some light voltage tweaking, the core could be overclocked all the way to 1000MHz core clock speed.

The ASUS Radeon HD 4890 video card is going to capture the attention of a lot of enthusiasts. ATI's Radeon HD 4890 has so far proved to be one of the fastest single GPU video cards on the market. The closest performing counterpart from NVIDIA, their GeForce GTX 285, is significantly more expensive. Combine that with the ability to play pretty much any game at mid-range widescreen resolution with all eye candy options turned to their maximum, and the ASUS Extreme AH4890 is a compelling graphics card for anyone who's serious about having a high quality gaming experience.