For a period there every six to eight months or so we'd see a new GPU and leaps of performance gained from the cards that had just come out but over the past few years this seems to have slowed down and for better of worse since ATI released the Radeon 4870 last June there haven't been too many major jumps ahead of that card except of course the 4870X2 and not much from Nvidia as well. Mid-range has seen tremendous improvement, however, offering phenomenal value in the sub-$100 market but above it things have slowed down. Recently AMD did at last follow the 4870 up with the Radeon 4890 which we looked at launch and now with some time since then we're seeing 1GHz variants of the 4890 and non-reference cards. Today we'll be looking at one of these non-reference design cards with the Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X.

If you're not up to date on the 4890, as the name might implies it basically shares the same basic specs as the Radeon 4870 except 1GB of GDDR5 is standard as opposed to 512MB of GDDR5 on some 4870 cards and the memory and core speeds have increased as well as some improved power management.

Sapphire's Vapor-X line has been around now for some time and is Sapphire's custom heatsink and fan combination. It runs quieter than the standard heatsink and also should allow for better overclocking. Our model came pre-overclocked with a core of 875MHz (25Mhz more than normal) and 1GB of GDDR5 running at 1050Mhz (75MHz above the standard clock). It also is a very slick design and on Sapphire's blue PCB as opposed to ATI red. It is a very aesthetically pleasing card and a lot of that also has quite a bit of function such as the ramsinks covering all the memory modules.

Sapphire have also decked out the video output ports of the card with every type on the market: DVI, VGA, HDMI, and even DisplayPort, which hasn't quite caught on yet with monitors. Sapphire also includes a DVI-to-HDMI cable rather than the standard dongle with other ATI cards which is a nice bonus.

The box is quite cool, no pun intended, and should stand out among the typical CGI characters on most video card boxes and all of the features of the 4890 series are shown off in the specs on the box.

The bundle is fairly standard other than the previously mentioned DVI-to-HDMI cable with a driver CD, two PCI-E to molex power adapters, Cyberlink DVD software, and as a bonus they also include 3DMark Vantage. Game bundles have come in and out of favor over the years and these days the trend is to not include a game unless you get it as a combo with hardware.

We've been over the standard features of the Radeon 4000 series time and time again but we'll go over them again very quickly: 2nd-gen 55nm production process, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, the only card with DX 10.1 support, and 7.1 uncompressed audio over HDMI.

Time is a little tight right now as other articles are cooking so we'll jump right into Sapphire's techincal specs and what you want: benchmarks.