Ballistics Report

Pros

HTPC-ready: With its HDMI and DisplayPort outputs available right on the back plate of the graphics card, Gigabyte’s GV-R489OC-1GD is equipped to drive the latest LCD and plasma televisions right out of the box, no adapters needed.

A dual-link DVI is also provided in case you’d like to hook the card up to your monitor, or perhaps your TV lacks HDMI and DisplayPort connections.

In theory, Gigabyte’s use of gold plating for the HDMI output should provide better protection from electromagnetic interference (EMI) than traditional nickel-plated connectors; ensuring the best possible signal quality.

Excellent Cooling: The GV-R489OC-1GD uses a heatsink/fan unit from Zalman, their VF1050.

With quad heatpipes and a dual-slot heatsink, the VF1050 does an excellent job of keeping the RV790 chip at the heart of the Radeon 4890 cool. In our testing idle temps were an astounding 16 degrees Celsius cooler than ATI’s stock cooler. At load, temps were six degrees cooler.

Why such a large discrepancy between idle and load performance? We think it’s because the Zalman fan runs at the same speed at all times, regardless of load. In comparison, the ATI fan is a variable speed fan that cranks the RPMs down when the card is running in 2D mode. With the fan on the Gigabyte card running at the same speed it really has a huge impact on idle temps where the stock ATI fan is running slower.

The sweet part about the Gigabyte fan is its able to keep the GPU cool while also running quietly.

900MHz core clock: For added performance, Gigabyte OCs the graphics core on their GV-R489OC-1GD board to 900MHz. That’s 50MHz higher than stock, or an increase of approximately 6%. In benchmarks, we found the faster core clock bought us an extra 2-4% in performance in games.

Aggressive pricing: With the GV-R489OC-1GD currently selling for $209.99 on Newegg right now, the card is priced pretty well in comparison to the competition. For just $20 more than the cheapest Radeon 4890 listing on Newegg, you get an aftermarket cooler from Zalman, whose VGA coolers often sell for $30-$50 online, and Gigabyte’s 4890 card is factory OC’ed.

Cons

DX11 right around the corner: Rumor has it that ATI’s next-generation DirectX 11 Radeon HD 5800 series cards could launch as soon as next month. If that happens, prices on existing 4890 cards could go down even further. The new DX11 cards could be significantly faster than today’s 4890 GPUs as well.