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AMD breaks through 1GHz GPU barrier
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 14th May 2009
AMD has broken through the 1GHz barrier for the first time with its RV790 GPU. It has now released a factory overclocked version of the Radeon HD 4890.
AMD has now announced an overclocked version of the Radeon HD 4890 which ships at 1GHz using "standard air cooling solutions".
At this speed, the Radeon HD 4890 can achieve 1.6 teraFLOPs of compute power, which is quite a bit more than any of Nvidia's competiting single-GPU solutions but of course not everything is equal.
Sapphire, XFX, Asus and PowerColor have announced pre-overclocked variants, with Sapphire's featuring its Vapor-X vapour chamber cooling solution – we'll have a review of this card very soon as it's currently sweating its way through our benchmarking suite.
"At 150MHz above stock speeds, this card will unlock new levels of performance and allow gamers to push t he latest DirectX 10.1 titles to new highs in image quality and frame rates," said Adrian Thomson, Vice President of Marketing at Sapphire.
XFX claims that there's even more headroom above the stock 1GHz frequency. "Hitting 1GHz is an amazing feat, even more so when done in production-level volumes and with overclocking headroom to spare," said Eddie Memon, Senior Vice President of Marketing at XFX.
It'll be interesting to see if there is additional headroom above the lofty 1GHz default clock. In terms of pricing, AMD hasn't revealed how much of a price hike we can expect, but we have pressed the company for pricing on this uprated part. Once we know, we'll let you know and we'll have to wait to see if it delivers good value over and above what's already out there. For now though, you can discuss AMD's landmark in the forums,
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EDIT: Either i've been ninja'd or I missed the GPU part. :p
How are temps going on it? If they're about equal to the non-OC stock card... or lower... I want one. :D Oh, needs to be fairly quiet, too.
And if this is overclock scales well... well that's nVidia's GTX285 dead and buried as 'fastest single GPU card'...
... you do realize the issue with your statement, right?
From the looks of it the powercolor and Sapphire cards both have aftermarket coolers.
It should be interesting to see whether these cards have any further overclocking potential or whether the 1ghz is pretty much the limit for the architecture (I assume the cores used on these are speed binned for the highest clocks with ones not able to reach 1ghz left for the standard HD4890?).
Right up until the run out of memory........ or CF doesn't scale properly.
(although at lower resolution settings without lots of AA/AF they do seem to fair quite well).
I suppose it's easier to say it's overclocked than to give it a new name or something. It's technically overclocked if it's the 'same' product but has been made to run at a higher speed than the stock SKU.
For me, it's ATI not AMD, because AMD is still sinking :p
Pedantics: Shouldn't it be 'hit/reached the 1GHz barrier' rather than 'breaks through the 1GHz barrier'? Seeing as it is exactly 1GHz.. Never mind
don't count on it, the new card is going to put out an insane amount of heat.
And to the ones that say, well a CF-SLI setup is faster...a single core GPU is less prone to...complications.
And usually uses less power :D
Yeah, I know. But the Vapor-X system has been good in the past for reduced temps with quieter operation.
Hell, the Vapor-X 3870 was single slot, but was still cooler and quieter than the stock cooler...
Given they have the normal HD4890 for <£170 I would say its overpriced.
ya maybe but ATI tends to be pretty good at getting their cards cool with a more silent solution then what typically nVidia is known for, lol I remember back in the day with those FX cards, man those suckers were loud and sound like a dentist drill lol.