Barely a week into the launch of Radeon HD 4890, AMD's partners are already emerging ready with non-reference PCB and cooler designs for the card. One of the first in the league is Powercolor Radeon HD 4890 PCS (Professional Cooling System), a name given to the card owing to its superior cooling system and factory-overclocked parameters. The company seems to have worked on a non-reference PCB design.

The 10-layer PCB breaks away from the reference design with its simpler VRM area consisting of standard chokes and MOSFETs. The design-approach is known to greatly reduce manufacturing costs. The GPU is cooled by a Zerotherm cooler with a large central fan, and aluminum fins to which heat is conveyed by four heat-pipes. The card will feature a rather high clock speeds of 950/1100 MHz (core/memory), against the reference speeds of 850/975 MHz. The price isn't known at this point in time, though we don't expect it to be priced much higher, looking at the design.

AMD clinched the performance crown from NVIDIA, and retained for a significantly long amount of time with the dual-RV770 based Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics accelerator. The company recently introduced the RV790 GPU, which went into making the Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator. Our reviews of this card, especially the AMD Radeon HD 4890 CrossFire review, brought forth some interesting findings with regards to how the accelerator works in tandem with another of its kind.

Holding significantly higher clock-speeds than the Radeon HD 4870, the accelerator managed to consume lesser amount of power in a pair than a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 accelerator. As a solution, it emerged faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295. The findings of several such reviews sparked of fresh speculations surrounding AMD planning a dual-RV790 accelerator with which it could potentially regain the performance crown. All such speculations were laid to rest by David Cummings, AMD's director of product marketing of discrete desktop graphics, under the graphics product group, in a recent interview with X-bit Labs (read here). Cummings claims that the company has no plans to create a "Radeon HD 4890 X2", at least not yet. The Radeon HD 4890 fills the gap between the HD 4870 and HD 4850 X2, while the HD 4870 X2 holds post at $399. A dual-RV790 card would not be feasible keeping the global economic climate in mind. The HD 4890 accelerators though, are capable of running in tandem with up to four cards of its kind, provided the system supports such a configuration.

PowerColor will launch the world's first water cooled Radeon HD 4890 next week, less than one week after the RV790 card was officially launched.

Part of PowerColor's LCS series, the upcoming Radeon card comes with a single-slot EK-made waterblock that has a copper base and high-flow 3/8" or 1/2" fittings. The waterblock should lower the GPU temperature by up to 20°C compared to the reference air heatsink. PowerColor will ship the Radeon HD 4890 LCS with GPU and memory clocks of 900 and 4000 MHz respectively.

The MSRP of the card will be $339.

Albatron, an official NVIDIA partner, has gently started producing cards from the red camp without making any announcements. So far Albatron was NVIDIA exclusive, but a few more cards in the portfolio, no matter NVIDIA or ATI, won't hurt much. The first ATI card from Albatron is a Radeon HD 4890 named Radeon HD 4890-1G. This model will be all-stock, clocked at 850 MHz for the GPU, with 256-bit memory interface and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 3900 MHz. The card should hit the market any time soon with a suggested retail price under $250. Later Albatron plans to release more products from the Radeon HD 4000 series.

To bring consumers various choices, professional motherboard and graphics card manufactures, Albatron Technology Co., LTD. announces Albatron Radeon HD 4890-1G. Full line of ATI products will be available soon to the market.

Albatron Radeon HD 4890-1G is based on ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU by advanced 55nm process, the fastest GDDR5 memory, and 800 stream processors. With massive graphic power, its data rate can speed up to 3.9Gbps. It can help increasing users' working efficiency and playing 3D game without lag. For professional users, they can set their own overclock mode; moreover, collocating ATI OverDrive utility and ATI CrossFire Technology, Albatron Radeon HD 4890-1G can blurt its power and performance up to next level.

MSI, leading brand manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today launched their latest R4890-T2D1G graphics card powered by 55 nanometer core and 800 stream processors coupled with 1GB of GDDR5 124.8 GB/s ultra-high bandwidth memory supporting DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0. Now gamers can experience superior performance with the most realistic special effects ever, all in life-like high definition. If you are in for best possible performance, the CrossFireX technology for multi-GPU operations will help you push your visual experience to the utmost maximum. In addition, the integrated UVD 2.0 hardware decoding technology makes sure that high definition audio and video playback will always be smooth and crisp. High Performance, High Efficiency and High image quality are the three focus strengths of the MSI R4890-T2D1G.

AMD today introduced the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, driven by the world's most powerful graphics processor. The newest addition to the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series boasts a whopping 1.36 TeraFLOPs of compute power, superior GDDR5 memory, and super-high engine clock speeds capable of nearly 1GHz. The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers the best game experience in its class, including the latest ground-breaking DirectX 10.1 titles. In addition, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4890, AMD continues to enhance its "Dragon" desktop platform technology, designed to provide exceptional value to OEMs, channel partners, and do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers.

TechPowerUp and Hightech Information Systems (HIS) present you a great opportunity to bag a Radeon HD 4890 1 GB graphics accelerator with body-graphics designed by you! The contest is pretty simple if you have the creativity and competitive spirit. We will provide you with a template and some image resources (company logos). You put your skills to work, and come up with a body-graphics design in one month's time. You get to submit as many as three candidates of your own. At the end of the contest, a panel of judges from AMD, HIS and TechPowerUp will select three of the best entries.

The winner gets his/her design printed on a special Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator made by HIS, and of course, the accelerator itself! The first and second runners up receive HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 512 MB, and HIS Radeon HD 4650 iSilence 512 MB respectively. For more information, contest rules, and to participate, visit this page. Good Luck!

XFX is starting its Radeon HD 4890 lineup with three models graded by the core clock-speed they come with. The base-model will carry reference clock speeds of 850/975 MHz (core/memory), the XFX HD 4890 XT, with clock speeds of 875/975 MHz, and the XFX HD 4890 XXX, with clock speeds of 900/975 MHz.

Something about the XXX model is interesting: almost every other AMD partner has a Radeon HD 4890 variant with the same core clock-speed: A certain ASUS Radeon HD 4890, Sapphire HD 4890 Toxic, HIS HD 4890 Turbo, and MSI HD 4890 OC, and a recent AMD slide exposé showing two distinct grades of Radeon HD 4890, with the second one being a "Radeon HD 4890 OC". This grade, according to Expreview, is believed to have high clock speeds, to increase competitiveness against the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 accelerator.

Coming back to the XFX HD 4890 XXX, the card (not pictured yet) comes in a peculiar "X"-shaped box. It comes with a free copy of Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., and is backed by the company's "5-star support". It is expected to be priced above US $250, which is supposed to be the base-price for Radeon HD 4890.

As reviewers world-over unbox their Radeon HD 4890 samples, NVIDIA, in a last-bid attempt not to give ATI a fortnight's headstart over GeForce GTX 275, has pulled its launch forward to April 2, the day Radeon HD 4890 hits shelves. Our sources however, indicate that this will be merely a paper-launch for NVIDIA, meaning that the actual product doesn't exist in retail channels, only that its SKU officially exists, get listed, perhaps gets open to pre-orders by retailers, and what's more, even previewed.

It will be mid-April by the time retailers actually start to sell GeForce GTX 275 accelerators. The accelerators will be of non-reference designs, with the specifications we know so far: 55 nm G200b GPU, 240 stream processors, 448-bit GDDR3 memory interface, and 896 or 1792 MB of memory. The clock speeds the card will run at are known to be 633/1404/1138 MHz (core/shader/memory). Its price will be very competitive with that of the Radeon HD 4890, around the US $250 mark.

Pitted for direct competition with ATI Radeon HD 4890, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 275 is slated for launch in April. The new SKU already has a listing by European retailer DollarShops.eu, where it is priced at 249 Euro. Yet another $1 = €1 equation in the making, as $249 is expected to be its American MSRP.

This time around, NVIDIA leaves it to the partners to make and sell graphics cards based on the GPU. Technically boards supporting the GeForce GTX 260 with its 14 memory chips, should be able to support the new GPU, which has 240 stream processors, while having a 448-bit wide GDDR3 memory interface, coming with memory capacities of 896 MB or even 1792 MB, if partners choose.

TechPowerUp today introduced GPU-Z version 0.3.3, our graphics sub-system diagnostic utility that provides information on the computer's installed graphics hardware, their various specifications, and provides real-time updates on their parameters such as clock-speeds, temperatures, and fan-speeds. GPU-Z is backed by our overclock validation system and an extensive video card BIOS database.

With version 0.3.3, the application expands its support base to some popular upcoming products, namely ATI Radeon HD 4700 desktop series, Radeon HD 4890, and GeForce GTX 275. Some common bugs found with previous versions, notably GT200 process size calculation, and G98 SP counts, have been fixed.

For more information and to download, please visit the download page.

Following our report of ASUS preparing an overclocked Radeon HD 4890 accelerator with clock speeds well above 900 MHz (core) and 1000 MHz (memory), the possibility has come to surface that AMD has carved out a new range of Radeon HD 4890 accelerators from the unusually high overclocking headroom the RV790 GPU has. The credit also goes to the reference-design PCB, which is known to possess some of the highest quality digital PWM components to handle power, and 4 GT/s GDDR5 memory, which is now known to have a good overclocking headroom.

It has surfaced on the forums of Chinese tech community PCInLife, that the RV790 rather effortlessly reached the 1 GHz mark, the slider-limit of Catalyst Control Center, sparking off fresh rumors that AMD partners may be creating a fresh niche of highly-overclocked cards shortly after Radeon HD 4890 comes to be. The overclocker reached speeds of 1 GHz (core) and 1125 MHz (4.50 GHz effective, memory). At the said speeds, the card was put through 3DMark Vantage with its eXtreme settings. It churned-out a score of X5480, which puts its performance somewhere between those of the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 285. It should also be taken into account that the drivers RV790 users the world over have been using, are preliminary beta drivers. AMD plans to release Catalyst 9.4 with the release of Radeon HD 4890, which just may impact positively on the performance of the product.

As we inch closer to the early-April launch of AMD's newest graphics card, the Radeon HD 4890, pictures of the said card by various AMD partners are piling up. Among all the usual reference-design cards we have seen so far, that virtually every partner is working on, we have learned that ASUS is working on something bigger. The company already has a reference-design card in the works, and another one that is set to eye the top-spot in the range of HD 4890 cards that will hit the market.

The company is designing a non-reference design accelerator that concentrates on a superior power design, and higher clock-speeds. We do not know what the company plans to call it, whether it joins the elite MATRIX series, or a "TOP" model under its general lineup, but the odds are tilting in favour of it featuring in the MATRIX lineup, the reasons you will soon know. Pictured below is its PCB, a list of some of the most notable features follows:

AMD has yet again stepped up excitement and anticipation surrounding a product-launch. This time, it's the company's fastest GPU: the RV790, whose single-GPU product, the Radeon HD 4890, is dressing up to go to office between April 6~8 worldwide. Taiwanese tech community website XFastest went found that volumes of the card by AMD partner Gigabyte have already reached a certain store.

The Gigabyte Radeon HD 4890 1 GB (model: GV-R489-1GH-B) is based on AMD's reference design, which has been pictured earlier, and whose early 3DMark performance figures have began surfacing. The card, features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, which now seems to be the standard amount of memory on the reference design card. The unboxed card has been pictured from a good angle, which gives us a better indication of its length. It is longer than the HD 4870. Another scoop we can bring to you, is that from the first picture of the RV790 GPU that was published by DailyTech, it has been observed that the die is slightly larger than that of the RV770. What makes it larger is not known at this point in time.

With AMD's new graphics card: the Radeon HD 4890 heading towards an April 6~8 worldwide launch, NVIDIA is looking at the situation carefully. While not wanting to spend much into devising a countermeasure, it still wants to address the potential threat Radeon HD 4890 poses. The most recent exposé by Taiwanese website OC Heaven shows there is reason to be optimistic about the performance HD 4890 could end up offering. NVIDIA's counter to the HD 4890 depends on where exactly it lands in its competitive positioning against NVIDIA. If it is closer to or better than what the GeForce GTX 285 offers, NVIDIA may bring in price-cuts for the GTX 285, making it more competitive, but if it is poised somewhere between the GTX 260 (216SP) and GTX 285, the new SKU GTX 275 will be brought in.

The new GPU will be specified to have all its 240 stream processors enabled, while having the memory interface GTX 260 comes with: 448-bit GDDR3, with memory configurations of 896 MB or 1792 MB. Furthermore, its development will be care of NVIDIA's partners, who gain license to do so from the company. NVIDIA will not develop a reference design. The launch of the new SKU will coincide with that of the HD 4890, perhaps a few days trailing it.

Taiwan-based English tech website OC Heaven has disclosed some performance figures of the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4890 1 GB graphics accelerator. The tests run are two of the most popular synthetic benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark06. Also disclosed, rather verified, are the card's clock speeds as read by ATI Catalyst Control Center and GPU-Z. The test bed, from what the 3DMark06 window shows, consists of an Intel Core i7 920 CPU running at 2.66 GHz, coupled with 3 GB of system memory. In 3DMark06, the HD 4890 accelerator secured a score of 16,096 points, with SM 2.0 score of 6155, HDR/SM 3.0 score of 7521, and CPU score of 4836. In 3DMark Vantage, it secured a score of P10996. Catalyst Control Center reveals the card's memory bandwidth to be 124.8 GB/s, up from the 111 GB/s on its predecessor, the HD 4870. The early driver in use makes provides "RV790" as the device string to GPU-Z.

Update (03/19):Ukrainian website Overclockers.com.ua has come up with a more comprehensive 3DMark shootout between cards in this segment. Radeon HD 4890 and HD 4890 CrossFireX are part of the comparison. The testers used an Intel Q6600 CPU running on an X48 motherboard with 4 GB of memory. The article can be read (Google-translated to English) here.

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

AMD will make this SKU official on April 8. Listings from Europe, and one from New Zealand, seems to suggest its pricing to be more around the €250 price-point, with its US price positioned at a $249 point.

Weeks ahead of launch, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator has already started to to get listed on online stores, not concentrated in a particular region. The HD 4890 is characterized by the upcoming RV790 graphics processor, it is a current-generation successor to the HD 4870 accelerator. Its specifications are unclear, though most sources in the industry and press have so far revealed it not to be much of a featureset expansion over the RV770.

Dutch retailer Salland Automatisering BV has listed the Sapphire-made accelerator for € 253.95 inclusive of VAT (€ 218.95 excluding it). Another retailer, PB Technologies Auckland (New Zealand), has listed it for NZ $613.97 (325 USD), including applicable taxes. The Dutch retailer went on to list some of the card's specifications. It features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 3.90 GHz (975 MHz actual). Its core is clocked at 850 MHz. No pictures, or information about the GPU's internals (such as stream processor count, TMU/ROP counts) were provided. Both retailers have put the product on pre-order. AMD is expected to release the card on April 8, 2009.

AMD is on the course of releasing a new line of high performance products based on its upcoming RV790 graphics processor. The high-end single GPU SKU, Radeon HD 4890 is expected to be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 (216 SP). NVIDIA on the other end of the field, is planning a retaliation to the RV790. The GPU giant is carving out a new SKU based on the 55 nm G200b: GeForce GTX 275.

The new SKU will be placed in the US $225~275 range. While the specifications are not known at this point in time, there are two theories: G200b with 216 stream processors and a 512-bit memory interface, and the other theory suggesting 240 stream processors with the existing 448-bit memory interface on GTX 260. The latter looks inexpensive as the former would step up manufacturing costs due to the addition of two memory chips.

With the release of ATI's next generation Radeon HD 4890 just a few weeks ahead, the company is going to cut the prices of its Radeon HD 4870 512 MB GDDR5 and Radeon HD 4850 512 MB video cards and thus balance its graphics cards product line-up. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB will drop $50, from $199 down to $149 and fight with NVIDIA's rebranded GeForce GTS 250 1 GB. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB will drop to $129, and will become main competitor of NVIDIA's GTS 250 512 MB version. Resellers and distributors are expected to start selling with the new prices this week.

AMD has been working the ATI RV790 GPU for a while now. It appears to be like it will take a little longer for the company to release an SKU based on it. Contradicting earlier reports, it is known that the RV790-based SKUs stay within the Radeon HD 4800 series, and not form the HD 4900 series.

The flagship single-GPU product based on the RV790 is to be called Radeon HD 4890. Samples based on the RV790XT A11 are currently running at speeds of 850/975 MHz (core/memory). AMD is reportedly telling its partners that the RV790XT is expected to be around 20% faster than the RV770XT (HD 4870), and has NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285 in its sights, for head-on competition. Additionally, AMD may force NVIDIA to reconsider its pricing, since the RV790XT is expected to be priced between US$199 to US$249, up to $150 cheaper than the GeForce GTX 285 in its current pricing. Unfortunately, one has to wait till April.