Gigabyte GV-R489OC-1GD Radeon 4890 Review

There are three basic categories of Radeon HD 4890 cards available on the market today. On the low-end are the plain jane reference designs that are exact replicas of each other and rely on the bone stock cooling and clock speeds ATI dictates at a minimum for the Radeon 4890 GPU. These cards tend to be priced cheaper – often right around $200 or less – as they're essentially competing for the gamer on a budget who wants no frills, and just wants to get their hands on 4890 technology at the lowest price point possible.

Then there are the hardware enthusiasts who want performance. For this user, card manufacturers offer their factory OC'ed 4890 boards.

Earlier this summer these cards tended to rely on the stock ATI cooler as well, but newer boards released in the last two months have offered significantly better cooling. These cards tend to reach for clock speeds approaching the 1GHz core clock frequency, and are priced appropriately.

The third camp wants the high-end cooling found on the aforementioned OC’ed 4890 cards; ATI’s stock cooler isn’t good enough. At the same time though these users don’t want to pay the $220+ many of the fastest Radeon 4890 cards sell for.

Basically, they want good GPU cooling, but they don’t want to be forced to donate an organ to afford it either.

Tapping into a different market: HTPCs

With their latest Radeon 4890 card, Gigabyte’s trying to entice a fourth category of users: the HTPC (home theater PC) crowd. Their GV-R489OC-1GD board ships with an aftermarket heatsink/fan solution from the cooling aficionados at Zalman, but at the same time the card is also affordable: it sells for $210 right now on Newegg. The card is also tailored for HTPC use thanks to its low noise cooler and diverse array of video outputs -- the board ships with dual-link DVI, DisplayPort, and a gold-plated HDMI video output.

Gigabyte also touts the GV-R489OC-1GD as their latest Ultra Durable VGA card, but to be honest ATI’s reference design already incorporates many of Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable features and as such most of the board-level components on Gigabyte’s card are the same as the ATI 4890 reference board design. Gigabyte has sourced different capacitors than the reference board, but everything else is the same as the reference design including the 4.0Gbps GDDR5 memory modules from Qimonda (Ultra Durable VGA cards traditionally rely only on memory modules from Samsung or Hynix).


It’s the dual-slot cooling you’ll probably be most interested in though. Gigabyte relies on Zalman’s VF1050 for cooling duties. The VF1050 is a bit of a hybrid in the sense that it isn’t quite a VF1000, nor is it a VF2000. It’s a ‘tweener that incorporates bits of both designs.

Its most important feature is its quad heatpipes. These heatpipes are responsible for drawing heat off the GPU, which is then distributed to a dual-slot aluminum heatsink. From there, heat is dispersed by a 75mm fan.


Unlike the retail Zalman coolers you can purchase online, the OEM Zalman cooler Gigabyte employs doesn’t ship with RAMsinks: the board’s memory modules are completely uncooled. Keep in mind that cooling isn’t necessary, as the modules are fully rated to run at 4890 speeds uncooled. In addition, another difference between Gigabyte’s cooler and a retail Zalman cooler is that the Gigabyte heatsink/fan unit also lacks Zalman’s Fanmate fan controller. Fanmate can be used to manually adjust the fan’s RPMs on-the-fly.

Zalman prefers to keep Fanmate exclusive to their retail cards: of the dozens of Zalman-equipped VGA cards we’ve tested over the years, none of them have ever shipped with Fanmate.

The Zalman cooler Gigabyte uses on the GV-R489OC-1GD is a terrific performer though. As you’ll see in the benchmarks, it outperformed the stock ATI Radeon 4890 cooler while delivering comparable noise output. What’s most notable is that it manages to do this while running at higher clock speeds than the stock 4890.

Clock speeds

While ATI’s reference specifications call for an 850MHz core clock speed for the 4890 graphics core, Gigabyte ups the core clock to 900MHz on their GV-R489OC-1GD, an improvement of 6% over stock. The board’s memory is then clocked at 975MHz, the same speed as ATI’s reference speeds.

Bumping up the graphics core 50MHz will improve performance over the stock 4890. The OC is a little tamer than some of the other 4890 cards on the market, but those cards are more expensive too. A quick check of Newegg reveals that Gigabyte’s GV-R489OC-1GD is one of the cheapest 900MHz Radeon 4890 cards on the market with aftermarket cooling.

Accessories

One downside to many competing Radeon 4890 cards that ship with HDMI and DisplayPort outputs is that they lack a dual DVI output option. Instead you’re limited to just one DVI.

Considering the rise in popularity of dual display, this is a huge oversight on the part of card manufacturers.

Fortunately this isn’t a problem for the Gigabyte GV-R489OC-1GD. Gigabyte thoughtfully includes an HDMI-to-DVI adapter that you plug into the HDMI output on the backplate of the card to power a second DVI display. The card also ships with a DVI-to-VGA adapter for those of you still running VGA monitors.

Also included in the card’s packaging is the obligatory CrossFire cable and 6-pin PCIe power adapter.