Introduction

Today AMD announced their Radeon HD 4890 Series. It is based on the RV790 GPU which is an improved version of the RV770. The major cornerstone specifications have remained the same, only improvements related to clock frequencies have been made. While it was almost impossible to get an RV770 to run far beyond 800 MHz, the ATI HD 4890 reference runs at 850 MHz core by default. Many partners will be offering overclocked boards as well ranging up to 1000 MHz core speed.

Since we managed to acquire two HD 4890 samples for our testing, we decided to bring you a multi-GPU performance review for the first time.

If you consider yourself a good artist, you may also want to check out our Create your own ATI high-end graphics card contest.


HD 4890 CrossFire is available on any AMD or Intel chipset motherboard that has two PCI-Express slots. After installing the cards you need to put both CrossFire bridges across the CF connectors, hook up the power and you are ready to go.

Once the drivers are up and running, you will be greeted by a message from ATI's Catalyst Control Center, that a CrossFire compatible configuration has been detected and that it would be best if you enabled CrossFire. This whole process is remarkably easy and even less experienced users will be able to do it. In case there is a problem CCC will notify you and present possible solutions.