PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 PCS+

So what most manufacturers (luckily) do these days is try to bring a product on the market that is pre-overclocked. Pre-overclocking is very good business and NVIDIA knows all about it, just check out how they commercialized the OC products.

ATI always has been way more conservative about it but after a lot of pressure from their AIB's, AIC partners and you as end-users, we do see a slight change in that approach. The Radeon HD 4890 however breaks all records when it comes to overclockability. Typically you see a core/memory increase of say 25 MHz. But no .. all partners are doing really funky stuff with the Radeon HD 4890. As we've just mentioned, the card is clocked at default at 850 Mhz on the core and 3900 MHz on the memory. With their PCS+ model PowerColor increases that core frequency towards a blistering 950 MHz and then clocks the memory higher to 4200 MHz as well. The result will be a very noticeable increase in performance, around 10%, but we'll check that out in our benchmark session of course.

Next to the faster clock frequencies there's another feature changed on this product; the cooler. PowerColor ditched the reference cooler and applied a nice looking ZEROthem cooler. A copper base touches the GPU core and four heatpipes are used to carry the heat away to a number of cooling fins where a PWM fan will blow it into your PC. That's correct, this fan is not exhausting air.

The cooler brings down the temperatures significantly and as our tests will show, even under massive stress it will not top ~75 Degrees C (167 F), which is really nice to see. A downside is that it's a bit of a noisy cooler. More on that later though.

But all facts combined bring a lot more performance to an already nice and fast product series. Below you can see that progression when you compare the different models a little.

So this most definitely is an interesting product series. With the RV790 ASIC ATI also was able to bring down heat levels in IDLE, and as positive side effect was able to bring down power consumption with another 30 Watts as well.

Package and bundle, once we open up the box we must admit to find a fairly nice bundle. Everything needed is included, and we even see a free game bundled, we get the following:

• PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 PCS+ HD BF Edition
• Quick installation guide
• Driver CD
• A copy of Battle Forge game
• 1 x DVI to VGA connector
• 1 x DVI to HDMI connector
• 1 x HDTV (Component) output cable
• 1 x CrossFire connector

Overall a pretty decent bundle we say, however we are missing the 6-pin PCIe to Molex power connectors. PowerColor should at the very least include one.

This very product can be spotted at roughly 239~249 USD, and for the EU you can expect something in the 210~225 EUR price range. That definitely is a little higher than the 'regular' model of the card, but remember what you receive in return for that; a custom cooler and more performance.

But let's have a look at the product and then startup some preliminary tests on heat levels, power consumptions and overall noise (sound pressure).