VisionTek HD 4890 OC Review - PAGE 2

Impressions

Being the fastest single-GPU video card in ATI's line-up, the HD 4890 has inspired many companies to try to maximize performance with changes to the default design. And now VisionTek has decided likewise, with today's new OC edition. 

The VisionTek's HD 4890 OC has a custom cooler crafted by ZEROTherm -- a experienced company separate from VisionTek that has been building various circuit coolers for about a decade now. 

It's a nice looking cooler, with a black metal finish. We have four heat pipes, which bodes well -- two reach into the heat fins below the fan, two are more spread out, near the end of the fins. A 9-vane fan spins to keep the fins cool. Most of the time you will not hear the fan -- only when it kicks things into really high power mode will it become audible. 

In addition to the ZEROTherm cooler, VisionTek fixed their HD 4890 OC with a couple of well placed heatsinks. There is one covering the GDDR5 memory chips; one over the voltage regulators; and a metal brace running along the top of the card that helps cool the PCB. All of these bode well for overclocking potential, beyond the Visiontek's out-of-box overclock.

The stock HD 4890 video cards have come up against some fierce competition: from the ATI side, you have the cheaper and cheaper HD 4870's (and even cheap HD 4830 / HD 4850 / HD 4770 CrossFire pairings for the more adventurous), and from the Nvidia side of the going you have well-priced overclocked GTX 260 cards, and the GTX 275. It looks like this HD 4890 from VisionTek will be able to stay in the game -- we'll have to see how it does in the benchmarks before passing judgment.

Specifications 

Being VisionTek's 'OC' model of video card, there is of course, an overclock. The default clocks for a HD 4890 are 850 MHz for the core, and 975 MHz for the memory, while this one runs at 950 / 1050 MHz. Certainly a significant overclock that should noticely impact performance levels.

Like other members of the current generation of ATI video cards, the VisionTek HD 4890 OC support DirectX 10.1, better HD/Blu-Ray movie playback through the Unified Video Decoder engine, Shader Model 4.0, and support for CrossFireX, enabling you to connect your HD 4870 with up to 3 more if you so feel like it (and your motherboard supports this feature.)

 * denotes cumulative effective efforts coming from 2 GPU's (i.e GTX 295: two GPUs with 240 cores equal 480)

Next we'll find out if we can push the VisionTek HD 4890 OC's overclock even further.