The Card

With the package out of the way it's time to have a look at the card itself and you can clearly see the first major feature of the card is the company's choice to move away from the stock cooler that we see on so many other HD 4890 cards. We've got a new design here that we haven't seen before and it certainly does a pretty good job of looking mean.

To the right we have a heatsink that sits atop some of the hotter components. Next to that we have a few more heatsinks, while the rest of the card is taken up with a large heatsink/fan. As good as the cooler looks, though, it will be interesting to see how it performs in the noise and temperature departments.

Due to the extra amount of memory here, Sapphire has had to place memory on the back of the card. Instead of just leaving that bare, they have decided to add a heatsink to them. While common a few years ago, due to higher density modules we rarely see modules on the back of the card, let alone heatsinks to cool them.

Going for a quick spin around the card, there isn't anything out of the ordinary. We have two power connectors at the back of the card; one's a 6-pin while the other's an 8-pin.

Closer to the front of the card we have our two CrossFire connectors which let us put up to three of these cards together.

Looking at the last bit of the card, we have the I/O ports. It's nice to see that Sapphire has put a bit of effort in here to make the card stand out. While we have out standard Dual-Link DVI connector, we also have a VGA port under that. Sitting to the left we have a native HDMI port and over further again we have a display port connector.

Specifications

Sapphire has taken the time to overclock the Vapor-X variant of the HD 4890 we have here today. We can see the company has moved from the stock 850MHz core to 870MHz. We can also see that the memory has been moved from the default 975MHz or 3900MHz QDR to a more aggressive 1050MHz or 4200MHz QDR.

While not as aggressive as the ATOMIC version of the card we looked at the other week which carries with it a 1000MHz core, this bump in performance should still yield a nice little performance increase over a stock clocked model.