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ATI HD4890 What a Great GFX Card

Jakus

Jakus

Jakus

Soldato
Joined
31 Jul 2004
Posts
3,730
Not one to go by most reviews, rumors and other people's opinions ;) I picked up a HD4890 to play with and it has impressed Me !

It runs very cool and I would say relatively quiet, under high load You get a "woosh" from the fan/cards exhaust but it's not a nasty "Jet type whine" like the old X850, 1800,1900 cards.
I have never had a problem with a little fan noise under heavy gaming but as this has a proper Fan curve and stays in the 60's under load with the Improved 4870 cooler ( extra internal heatpipe) You could easily run a fixed fan setting in CCC and reduce noise further and keep the card under 80c if required.

Seems ATI still can't find a way of changing DDR5 clocks without causing a little Screen flash so run the Memory at full speed all the time which is wasting lot's of power , I have a workaround by editing the bios as I did for the 4870 although this card runs driver controlled voltage regulators I have easily dropped 20+watts in the Desktop and the card idles at 46c

I played with Asus smart doc utility but although it will help anyone wanting heavy overclocks it seemed to do very little to reduce power off load.

So there You have it, If You liked the HD4870 Your going to love the HD4890 ;)

I would be interested to hear other owners thoughts
 
I got mine on Saturday and am Loving it so far (Coming from a 8800GTS). Runs at about 50 on the desktop and hits around 80 when overclocked (950 core and i think the RAM was at 1150) with the fan speed set to auto.

Have you tryed setting the fan to manual 100%? Its insane how loud it is!
 
I installed mine yesterday afternoon, upgrading from an x1950 Pro.

I couldn't find the extra modular plug I needed for my Corsair PSU and thought I'd thrown them away so started panicking... I didn't realise it needed two connections from the PSU! :D

Anyway, so far I've been playing Bioshock, Left4Dead and Fallout 3 all maxed out at 1900x1200, and even with my ancient E6300 CPU, everything runs smoothly - I'm more than happy! I've left the fan manually set to 29% and I can barely hear it - temps seem fine.

Can't wait to try with Vista 64 and 4GB RAM :)
 
Yes, I have tried the Fan at 100% :eek: You will probably find 65/70 % speed is Cooler saturation so over that is just a waste.....Not tried it mind, It's just how these sort of things work ;)
 
theforce said:
Indeed l love my new 4890. Mass Effect looks much better than my old 3850.
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I've never played this - is it any good? A mate of mine said if I liked KOTOR (loved it!) then I'd like Mass Effect?

Only thing putting me off buying it is the whole SecuROM furore that kicked off some time ago.
 
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Solari said:
I've never played this - is it any good? A mate of mine said if I liked KOTOR (loved it!) then I'd like Mass Effect?

Only thing putting me off buying it is the whole SecuROM furore that kicked off some time ago.
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yes if you loved Kotor you'll at worst like it, at best you'll like it more than Kotor. Its got Kotor quality story/depth/characters but the action is really move direct and involved rather than clicking and queuing attacks. For me the direct aiming and more real time use of powers is a vast improvement, so for me it boils down to same quality story with far better action. one of the best games of the past few years for sure.

AS for the card, picked one up myself, downgrading from a 4870x2 though, figure I can get cash for that while its still worth anything, got a good price on the 4890 and seeing as a large amount of gaming I do is MMO's which I play windowed so I can use desktop and have tv/films on aswell the crossfire is wasted as it only works for fullscreen games. Reason being now its getting warmer the 2nd core doing nothing but spitting out heat into my radiator like room(3 walls get sun direct for most of the day) it doesn't seem worth it.

Has anyone worked out what 3rd party coolers will actually fit/work with the 4890 as afaik none of the thermalright stuff fits the card.

Gonna play with stock fans though, the 4870x2 needed to high a fan speed for my liking to stay stable in games, one less core and I can hopefully just use a lower fan speed and get away with stock cooling.
 
i had some minor issues with mine kept locking up at first then i uninstalled physX and none of my games worked reinstalling it and restarting my PC did the job grid runs smooth as @2048x1152 max settings have mine overclocked to 950/1100 with min bump on voltage as it juiced out one error when stress testing. even tried the new folding@home gpu this thing churns thru it like mad! fastest ive ever seen mine work was 1200/s any advances?

edit: i have an arctic cooling accelero twin turbo and zalman gpu RAM heatsinks sitting there gna try them out when i have bought some AS5 or AC MX2 not sure:D
 
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siumatfung said:
edit: i have an arctic cooling accelero twin turbo and zalman gpu RAM heatsinks sitting there gna try them out when i have bought some AS5 or AC MX2 not sure:D
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I'm not sure that type of cooler will do as good a job, especially on cooling memory and power circuit.....and that's assuming the heatsinks stay stuck !
 
Floyd said:
I got mine on Saturday and am Loving it so far (Coming from a 8800GTS). Runs at about 50 on the desktop and hits around 80 when overclocked (950 core and i think the RAM was at 1150) with the fan speed set to auto.

Have you tryed setting the fan to manual 100%? Its insane how loud it is!
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I'm thinking of trading my 8800GTS in for one of these - what's the performance increase like?
 
My Catalyst Control Centre shows the GPU Clock as alternating between 240 and 850MHz at the desktop, is this some energy saving thing or a bug?

I'm gonna give it a go on 900/1000 and see how temps go.
 
Solari said:
My Catalyst Control Centre shows the GPU Clock as alternating between 240 and 850MHz at the desktop, is this some energy saving thing or a bug?

I'm gonna give it a go on 900/1000 and see how temps go.
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That is quite normal, for the driver to be calling max 3D core clock You must be running some sort of 3D app, Riva tuner perhaps ? something like GPUZ without the graphical interface should not cause the switching.
 
Thanks.

After almost 2 hours of playing Fallout 3, the temp shown in Catalyst Control Centre is only 54*C... that's pretty damn good with the fan running at 29% :D

Looks like I'll be putting a decent overclock on this and getting some new, quieter case fans :D
 
Stelly said:
I know what you mean I have been debating it for aaaages

Stelly
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I really don't know which to go for. :confused: I mean they seem to both trade punches in game benchmarks and both apparantely overclock very well. It's only the fact that i have had good experiences with my 7800 and 8800 cards and a bad experience with an ati 9800pro that is swaying me towards nvidia. ( sounds kinda silly i know but these things do affect the pereception of a product)
 
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