Specs and Power in Comparison

Relatively lower power consumption means that at idle the RADEON 4890 uses less power at idle in absolute terms, and under full load it uses less power than a linear scaling of the 4870 up to the newly realized clock frequencies would predict. Again, we are not too concerned about the power figures here but we have some real world scenario equivalents to back up our reasoning later in this article.

Hi-lights of the chart above are the increased transistor count of the 4890, bringing the net count up to 959Million transistors and the fact that there are "two different versions of the RADEON HD 4890 in circulation. The first "stock version" features a core clock of below 900 MHz, whereas anything released by the partners with a core frequency of 900 MHz or above will have the additional "OC" moniker. Needless to say that the performance will scale with the frequency as does the load power, whereas idle power is not affected.

Two 6 pin connectors instead of the 6+8 pin configuration we have come to know from the established "power hogs". To play devil's advocate, we ran the RADEON HD 4890 on an Intel DX58SO "Smackover" board with a Core i7 965, 6 GB of DDR3 and 2 HDDs using an ancient OCZ ADJ520 PSU - without any problems.

Important at this point is the performance. The 4800 series, starting with the "entry level" 4850 has swept the market with their price-performance ratio with the 4850 being the undisputed king of "bang for the buck" and the 4870 ruling in the performance world. nVidia on the other hand has their 200 series, supporting PhysX and Cuda that are somewhere between marketing gimmick and acts of desperation. Realistically, in terms of performance, nVidia is on the same level as AMD, depending on the angle of view, with AMD delivering somewhat better performance at lower resolution and nVidia taking the lead when it comes to the ultra-high end of display technology at blazing 2560 x 1600 pixels resolution. Personally, I still haven’t found a screen like that that I actually like, rather I spend the money on a new graphics card or two and the hottest contender in this case is AMD’s just-released RADEON HD 4890.