Introduction

Can you guys believe it has already been 11 months since ATI released their Radeon HD 4870? Time flies and ever since that first review we were convinced that the RV770 GPU empowering this graphics card would become a very nice and much needed success for AMD.

Prolonging the success of the 4870... in early April this year ATI launched a respin product called the Radeon HD 4890. As you guys know this is the RV790 ASIC, a slightly tweaked yet faster running version of that original model. See, one of the biggest surprises of that RV790 was its scalability in terms of clock speeds. Where the Radeon HD 4870 was clocked at roughly 750 MHz, the Radeon HD 4890 from day one was clocked at 850 MHz. But it didn't stop there though, no Sir. Merely a week or two after the launch of the 4890 the first rumors, and later on press-releases, surfaced; the AIB, AIC partners of ATI would be releasing overclocked models of the Radeon HD 4890, which was barely released really. Right now even there are cards announced that will come with a 1024 MHz core clock frequency.

Today we test a product that comes close... VERY close to that clock frequency. It's the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic Vapor-X edition graphics card. Armed with a nice vapor chamber heatpipe based cooler and with it's clock frequency locked in at a steady 960 MHz, this little beast is ready for some serious gaming action. And it doesn't stop there though, even the nice phat 1 GB graphics memory is clocked higher at 4200 MHz.

So when we look all the way back to that Radeon HD 4870 and compare it to the new faster clocked 4890 models, we surely have to admit, ATI and its partners have done a hell of a job moving forward at a steady and incremental pace.

Today we will test and review that Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic Vapor-X edition graphics card, and I can already tell you that we absolutely have been impressed by this product from A to Z. So let's head on over to the next page where we'll start up this review.

But of course not before you have had a peek at what we are reviewing today.