Well AMD recently rolled out its latest RV790 based board running at 1GHz, and the reason why this graphics card is so special is obvious, the dream of 1GHz on your graphics chipset is now a reality. Let us recap, their RV790 core has been announced at the beginning of April this year, and it just quickly found its place in AMD's best single GPU graphics card. The RV790 runs at 850MHz, which is a significant improvement over the 750MHz core of their Radeon HD 4870 versions. The difference between these two cards is at a glance quite insignificant and is evident only in the higher MHz counts, but note that the core went through some significant changes allowing it to run at 1GHz and maybe more. - FudZilla

XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB Black Style Edition Review

By redesigning the internal structure, their old RV770 core has been adapted for higher clocks.This RV790 core is isolated with an decap ring, used to suppress electromagnetic interference. And AMD also made some changes on the power distribution systems, which resulted in consumption lower than on their Radeon HD 4870. So being certain that the RV790 will run at higher than 850MHz, AMD decided to showcase its Radeon HD 4890 at 900MHz in April and said how the cards will easily run at 1GHz. This was a bit of an unusual step, as we're used to seeing partners overclock the graphics cards first but it is quite encouraging.

Though XFX took the best RV790 chips and created its Radeon HD 4890 Black edition series of cards. These are the first cards running at 1GHz with air cooling and XFX guarantees stable operation at these clocks. We've said that the Black edition is the first graphics board that hits 1GHz with standard air cooling, but its cooling is not that great if you like silence. Despite the fact that it keeps the temperatures in check, it gets quite loud. Of course, CrossFire is supported on this board. The fan is designed to push hot air out of the case, through the grills above the DVI outputs. And do note that the card is a dual slot version.

The new XFX board, their Radeon HD 4890 Black edition runs at 1GHz, a speed which has once been an overclockers dream whereas today it's just a matter of simply choosing an overclocked Black edition. XFX bundles it with the Hawx gift game so its the entire DirectX 10.1 package priced at about $299. The card will of course enable playing all the newer titles at standard or higher resolutions. Appearance wise, the XFX Radeon HD 4890 Black Eeition looks very much like all the rest of the Radeon HD 4890 pack, meaning the cooling is still reference. Unfortunately, this isn't quite what we would like as it does get pretty loud.

Of course, you can regulate the fan speed, but in order to keep the temperatures down at 1GHz, the fan has to spin fast. Compared to the Radeon HD 4870 card, the new Black edition runs 250MHz faster, whereas compared to the Radeon HD 4890 it runs at 150MHz more. XFX's performance is excellent, and a couple of benchmarks have seen better results. Another good thing about this card is its 1GB of GDDR5 memory, which will help with results at higher resolutions. The XFX Radeon HD 4890 Black edition is a gamers card and we would recommend it to anyone who wants the best, and doesn't care about noise that much.