It is our pleasure today to welcome Sapphire's Radeon HD 4890 Atomic edition graphics board which runs at no less than 1GHz, while at the same time being really quieter compared to the reference design. The Radeon HD 4890's reference clocks are 850MHz core and 3600MHz effectively for the GDDR5 memory chips. Sapphire overclocked the memory on its Atomic edition to 4200MHz effective speed. We like the fact that Sapphire used its Atomic cooling on the first 1GHz card and the company definitely made our day as this card won't make you turn up the music to kill the fan noise and anyone who's ever heard the Radeon HD 4890's fan at maximum speed surely knows what we're talking about. - FudZilla

Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic Series Review

Note however that not any Radeon HD 4890 can be overclocked so high, since such a feature requires the best and 1GHz capable cores, something that the Atomic HD 4890 series obviously packs. However, we can't say that Sapphire is just alone in this game, as a couple of partners have also managed to break the magical 1GHz barrier as well. And in fact also XFX with their Black edition has already released something similar delivering a fabulous pre-overclocked graphics card with the core running at 1GHz to deliver stunning game play. Both these cards are the top notch Radeon HD 4980 series offering the best performance.

Though when actually comparing these two graphics cards they are different, and this simply due to the Atomic series custom cooling solution. Now combine that with the little higher memory speed set by Sapphire and the Atomic HD 4890 is just a little faster during our prelimitary benchmarks. And in that light we could already assume that Sapphire has once again a winner in their hands.