Diamond HD4890-XOC, Review – Part 2
Conclusion
Our results are very consistent and we carried on where our Diamond HD 4890-xOC Preview, Part 1 left off. We see Diamond’s overclocked HD4890-XOC coming on very strongly to replace the HD4870 as AMD’s top single-GPU. We also note excellent scaling over the HD4870 and even continued further good scaling with our very modest overclock. We see the HD4890-XOC even trade blows with Nvidia’s now second-fastest single GPU, the GTX280. We are most impressed and highly recommend Diamond’s HD4890-XOC as offering great bang-for-buck!
As we move on to the third part of our review series featuring Diamond’s HD4890-XOC in CrossFire and CrossFireX configurations, we will also upgrade to the next set of drivers from each vendor. Catalyst 9-5 and GeForce 185.85. This way you can see the driver’s continued progress and compare their performance directly from one driver set to the next. We intend to closely examine possible architectural differences between the HD4890 and the HD4870 series which will also feature CrossFireX – pairing “FrankenFire’s” HD4890 and HD4870 against “true” HD4890 CrossFire. We will also show you our HD4870-X2 paired with the HD4890 and also the HD4870-X2 paired with the HD4870, compared. And we have a new “Big GPU shootout – revisited” in the works for you – with many more video cards and game benchmarks than our original from last September.
Our “Shoot-out Series” has been a steady progression examining Intel’s Penryn platform, and we have been upgrading it as necessary to maximize our PC’s gaming performance and to chart those improvements for you. Part IV, The Summary, showed this by comparing drivers all the way back to August 2008 when we first began benchmarking and focusing on the progress each vendors has made since then.
In our installment of Part III, Big GPU Shootout, PCIe 1.0 vs. PCIe 2.0, we especially focused on the motherboard’s effects on video card performance, using the extremes – P35 PCIe 1.0 vs. X48 PCIe 2.0. We saw how limiting the older motherboard’s PCIe bandwidth can be in certain situations and so we upgraded to X48.
Part II – The Big GPU Shoot-Out – Setting New Benches – demonstrated the need for overclocking our E8600 CPU from its stock 3.33 GHz to 4.0 GHz to take full advantage of our new video cards.
Part I, The Big GPU Shootout: Upgrade Now or Wait? we examined the performance of five video cards. We realized that the last generation’s video cards are not sufficient for today’s DX10 maxed-out gaming. Since our Q9550S review article, we now use Core 2 Quad Q9550S and recommend it highly! We also started to bench with CrossFireX-3 in Part I which ran on fairly immature Catalyst 8-8 drivers at the time and we have continued to chart its progress until now.
Stay tuned. We think we will have some very interesting articles for you to read as you plan your own coming upgrades. Well, we are done with our benches and this part of our series featuring Diamond’s HD4890-XOC and we are already working on our next article featuring the HD4890 in CrossFireX! In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. We also want to let you know that we will again run a brand new promotion with nice prizes and a contest shortly in our forum. We even have a couple of brand new XBox360 games to give away there! Always look for these announcements on the main ABT page and in our forum. We want you to join us and Live in Our World. It is fast expanding and we think you will like what you progressively discover here.
Mark Poppin
ABT editor
Please join us in our Forums
Follow us on Twitter
For the latest updates from ABT, please join our RSS News Feed
