It has been a little while since ATI launched a new video card after the onslaught of new graphics cards last year which brought back very healthy competition into the graphics market and helped AMD steal the scene from Nvidia. While Nvidia has launched some new cards most of them are nothing more than re-brandings which doesn't exactly make for an exciting launch. ATI's 4870 X2 was launched all the way back in August and the 4870 in June. While the transition to 40nm is taking a little longer for both ATI and Nvidia, the 55nm manufacturing process has come a long way since last summer and is now much more perfected. In essence, this is what we have with ATI's new GPU, the Radeon 4890 HD, launching today.

Looking at the card physically it seems to be nearly identical to the 4870 with ATI's trademark red PCB. It is a dual slot card with the large heatsink with heatpipes and fan covering the entire front of the card. Two 6-pin PCI-E power connections are required for operating, the same dual DVI outputs allowing for 7.1 audio over ATI's HDMI-to-DVI adapter, all of the DX10.1, UVD2 and PowerPlay Technology. Not much has changed

Onto the the technical specifications.

As you can see other than a higher clockspeed and lower idle power consumption numbers the 4890 appears unchanged. Basically there were adjustments to decrease the leakage, power consumption, and heat of the card. We can say without a doubt these cards run infinitely cooler than the original 4870 graphics cards that came out last year.

The card we'll be looking at is a Gigabyte branded one which shipped at a GPU clockspeed of 900MHz which is 50MHz above the standard 4890 clockspeed. What you'll also see with these cards is that overclocking headroom the best ATI has ever had. We were limited only by the ATI Overdrive clockspeeds and the fact that the current RivaTuner doesn't work with the beta drivers we used from ATI.

As far as pricing the Radeon 4890 is available now for $258. The cheapest 4870 1GB we can find is for about $205 currently without rebates. ATI states prices should be at $249 and $229 after rebate for stock cards today so we should see this price come down a bit soon.