Asus EAH 4890 1GB DDR5 PCIe Graphics card

Conclusion

I among many were eagerly awaiting the release of the ATI 4890 so when it turned up on my doorstep I couldn’t wait to give it a quick blast. While it wasn’t exactly ground breaking, far from it, it did show some significant improvements over the ATI4870 in all of the benchmarks we ran today. This is due to the increase in clockspeed on both the GPU and memory. Thanks to the revised power circuitry, the card runs much faster than the ageing 4870 and with a minor Voltage Tweak using Asus Smart doctor, both the GPU and memory clockspeeds were allowed to be maxed out in the Catalyst control centre’s overdrive section.

The Asus EAH4890 comes extremely well packaged and caters for your every need in the accessory department. I  like the compartmentalised box very much but I do wonder how many people would make use of the mousemat as it’s hardly what I would call a gamers mat and considering it is most likely only the gaming market who would buy such a card, included such a tiny mat does raise an eyebrow. While a nice touch, accessories such as this should really be omitted which would bring the price down little or maybe include a mat that a gamer could make use off?

Is it worth the upgrade? I wouldn’t say so no. At £214.99 over at OcUK the card is priced competitively but the 10% improvements it offers over the lesser (and cheaper) 4870 while significant are not worth upgrading for. It’s certainly no quieter than the old card and kicks out just as much heat, if not more. There just isn’t enough there to warrant the upgrade I’m afraid, that is unless you really do crave every last frame per second from a single GPU setup. The Voltage tweak is a nice addition but when CCC limits the users to certain clockspeeds I fail to see the point. I did try Rivatuner but unfortunately it was unsupported at the time of writing.

However, if you are looking for an upgrade from an old card from a previous series then you will find the EAH4890 right up your street. It can handle most games easily at all but the highest resolutions and even then, it’s only the likely suspects (Crysis and Far Cry 2) which cause the card any trouble.

The Good
– Class leading packaging
– Socket/port protectors
– Excellent overclocking
– Voltage adjustment

The Mediocre
– Included Mouse mat is pretty but useless for gaming
– No included game
– The Price

The Poor

– Noisy reference fan

Thanks to Asus for providing us with the EAH4890 for todays review. Discuss in our forums.