PowerColor's HD 4890 PCS can impress with great performance right out of the box. In our benchmarks we saw its performance on par with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 275. Unfortunately the performance increase comes at the cost of power draw. In both idle and load the card draws a lot of power, making it the least efficient card in our test group when considering performance per Watt. After installing a new BIOS we were impressed by the quiet idle fan noise that the HD 4890 PCS emitted. Unfortunately the picture changes dramatically under load. The card often gets stuck between two fan speed levels which results in constant fan speed changes in very short intervals. As a result the fan speed draws much more attention to it than usually.
The custom designed PowerColor PCB allowed some freedom in component selection. Instead of using two expensive Volterra controllers, a single, cheaper, OnSemi controller is used. As a result PowerColor can offer their card at the same price as normal reference design cards which makes this an interesting deal for many users.