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Impressions

The Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic shares the same Vapor-X-variety cooler as other recent high-end Sapphire models, most obviously of course, the HD 48xx Vapor-X line. The difference between these models is two fold: first, the Atomic has the highest overclock of any of Sapphire lines; and second, the cooler is a step more robust, in order to sustain this high overclock.

The cooler used on the Atomic is proven design. The aforementioned Vapor-X cooler idea utilizes a Sapphire-made "Vapor Chamber Technology." Small amounts of fluid are present in an sealed chamber in the cooler; the fluid gets vaporized, then when cools condenses, and this aids heat dissipation. The system does seem to work, as we found in our look at the HD 4870 Vapor-X.

Besides the Vapor-X angle, the cooler is fairly straight-forward. A 90mm, seven vane fan runs in the center of the card. The fan is fairly quiet, and the vanes are angled in such a way as to move a significant amount of air.

An extensive aluminum base plate covers about 3/5ths of the PCB. The cooler is further composed of your requisite bank of heat fins (the longest of which direct heat out of the bracket), and three good-sized aluminum heat pipes keep the heat moving.

Standard design on the left, nuclear power on the right

As far as the many HD 48xx cards Neoseeker has reviewed, the HD 4890 Atomic has particularly good cooler coverage on the memory chips, leading one to expect the overclocking potential for the GDDR5 memory should be above average.

Atheistically speaking, the Atomic isn't that much of a looker. A droll, blank-faced dread-locked woman takes up the right end of the card, and the plastic shroud is glossy and black. But hey, video cards are more about performance than looks, so we won't hold this against Sapphire.

Specifications

And when it comes to performance, the HD 4890 Atomic does have some right to boast. Along with two other simulatenous launches from alternate companies, Sapphire was tied to launch the first AMD/ATI GPU that broke the 1GHz clock speed barrier, putting the Atomic in very select company. The standard clocks for a HD 4890 are 850 / 1950 (core, memory.)

Contrary to what you might imagine, not every GPU coming out of the factory is made equal. The 55nm scale of manufacturing is so small that it is almost difficult to actually mentally conceive. A lot of GPUs won't even work when first tested. Some GPUs, for whatever reason -- be the resilience of materials involved, luck or machine precision -- will be better able to reach high top speeds that others. The GPU's powering the Atomic cards are the particularly above-average RV790s that were produced.

The current generation of ATI video cards support DirectX 10.1, better HD/Blu-Ray movie playback through the Unified Video Decoder engine, Shader Model 4.0, and support for CrossFireX, enabling you to connect your HD 4870 with up to 3 more if you so feel like it (and your motherboard supports this feature.)

 * denotes cumulative effective efforts coming from 2 GPU's (i.e GTX 295: two GPUs with 240 cores equal 480)

As you can see, the Atomic has some impressive specs. Let's see how well it does in the benchmarks now.