Tuesday, March 17th 2009
PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 Pictured
The first press-shot of PowerColor's upcoming Radeon HD 4890 accelerator has surfaced on its early listing by German retailer Schottenland.de, from which one can draw several inferences, we will tell you some of the most relevant ones:
- The Radeon HD 4890 is based on the RV790 GPU, its ASIC and board design is very similar (if not identical) to its predecessor, the HD 4870 / RV770
- It comes with near-identical specifications, so far its clock speeds seem to be the only specification that sets it apart
- It comes with a core clock speed of 850 MHz, with a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, with memory clocked at 975 MHz (effective 3900 MHz, 1950 MHz DDR)
- It features 800 stream processors, and supports DirectX 10.1, SM4.1
19 Comments on PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 Pictured
OMFG, IT LOOKS EPIC... It looks just like the 4870, which looks like the 3870, which looks just like 2900, which looks just like 1950...:laugh:I'll agree though, it's a little underwhelming. The margin on this product will be significantly higher than what they're making on the 4870 though, and more than most others in this market, that's where AMD needs to improve their products. As it stands, the increasing success of ATi has had little affect on their financial situation, which I believe to be largely the result of the slim profit they must turn on a lot of their product lineup...
It seems that for actual games, both Nvidia and AMD are not considering launching new hardware, only adding cores and MHz. we gotta wait for DX11 to see a completly new card, getting a video card upgrade just feels completely unadvised to me by now.
I really hope I'm being totally mislead, I definatelly don't want AMD to suffer on the market so we reach again Nvidia monopoly... so, here I am, hoping for (many) hidden&untold features of the brand-new RV790...
__________________________________________
"The following card required a power plant to run"
RV790
Remember that RV790 IS A NEW DESIGN. It isnt "just" an OC RV770. What they have done is modified the design slightly to manage hotspots and crosstalk and GDDR5. It's a bit like taking software code and rearranging the order of routines and data within the program... albeit the program has identical functionality. They do this in the CAD software for designing the chips. They have "slightly moved" where the various "processor/shader blocks" and "interconnects" are in the layout. A picture of an RV770 and an RV790 will look similar, but not identical. They may have even increased the size (or changed density) of shader blocks to manage heat, and may have also debugged some microcode... just like the Radeon 9800 over the Radeon 9700. Marginal differences.
Otherwise, yes, it is the same architecture. But the layout of the die is "slightly" different, so warrants a new code. A bit like a new stepping on a CPU.
If Nvidia can do it, I guess ATI can too. I'm just glad they didn't go ahead and change the number to 5000.
I was wondering, has anyone done a 4870/4890 with the power connectors on the side, and not on the end?
If not, Sapphire/PowerColor/etc could you make me one? kthxbye.
ATI 1950XTX
ATI 2900XT
ATI 3870
ATI 4870
ATI 4890