The Card

As we mentioned before, Sapphire always tends to mix it up in the cooling department when they attach the ATOMIC naming scheme to a model and as you can see below this model is no different with a more traditional type fan/heatsink being used.

We can see in the middle of a card a fan which is placed directly over the top of the core. We also see that Sapphire has a sticker on the card which again shows the ATOMIC and Vapor-X logo that we saw on the front and rear of the box. We've also got the Sapphire logo on the fan along with the ATI one and the model in the top right corner.

Having a look at the top of the card, we can see that Sapphire has opted for a heat pipe design. We have four that come from the core and move out to the aluminum heatsink; this just helps move the heat away from the core and get it off the card.

While we tend to see connectors that resemble the reference model, it's a bit different here. While we still have two power connectors at the back of the card, one is an 8-pin; other HD 4890s we've seen use a dual 6-pin setup.

As for the front of the card there isn't anything out of the ordinary here with our two Crossfire connectors being present which of course gives us the ability to run up to three of these bad boys in a single PC.

The I/O department doesn't hold anything we haven't seen before. There's two Dual Link DVI connectors, a single TV-Out port and a bunch of vents which lets the hot air get out the back of the card and out of your system.

Specifications

The clocks are where the ATOMIC version of the card should really shine and shine they do. With a stock GPU clock of 1000MHz we've got some serious power on offer here.

What we can also see is that Sapphire has ramped up the memory clock from 3900MHz QDR to 4200MHz QDR. What these increases should result in is a nice little performance increase in most games and at most resolutions.