A Closer Look

ASUS' cooler uses six fat heatpipes to transport heat away quicky from a copper base to a large area of cooling fins. As you can see from the additional thermal pads, the cooler also cools the memory chips and the voltage regulation circuitry.


Unlike all other HD 4890 cards on the market today, the EAH4890 TOP uses one six-pin and one eight-pin power connector. You must connect 6+8, just using two six pin power connectors will not work.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X. With a cycle time of 1.0 ns, they are specified to run at 1000 MHz.


ASUS has opted for the dual Volterra voltage controller design on their EAH4890 TOP. This means that software can control both GPU and memory voltage. Other AIBs have chosen to go with a more simple design here to reduce cost.


This is the mystical Super ML capacitor that there is so much talk about. In essence it does the same as the "normal" electrolytic capacitors on graphics cards, they filter out unwanted fluctuations in the GPU supply voltage. ASUS claims a voltage stability improvement from 143mV to 114 mV (~20%) which is not that much. No it doesn't mean you can overclock 20% more.
In essence, Multilayer Polymer Capacitors are based on the same principle as electrolytic capacitors but are implemented as a large number of smaller capacitors connected in parallel inside a single package. This results in a lower ESR - just like if you had additional electrolytic capacitors on the board. Due to the construction, the Multilayer Polymer Capacitors are also immune to leaking which eliminates the blown capacitor problem you see on some older motherboards. Compared to several normal capacitors, SuperML caps are considerably more expensive.
While I doubt SuperML will result in a substantial overclocking experience, the general graphics card buyer will however notice this as a feature that the other companies do not have. Yes, that's called marketing and it's an important part of the product development process. I have to give credit to ASUS who figured out a way how to put a unique feature on their product and how to properly market it.


This is AMD's RV790 GPU. It is identical to RV770, except for improved signal routing which allows higher operating frequencies. It is made on a 55 nm process at TSMC Taiwan, the 959 million transistors occupy 282 mm² of die area.