Reviews - Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 XT and XFX Radeon HD 4890 OC vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX

[HEXUS]

Three new cards fight it out for dominance in the £200-£250 space. Who wins? Find out.

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[kalniel]

Good review. Extra kudos for making the point about availability - hopefully that'll only be a short term thing, since nVidia have been making these chips for their 295 for a while. At that price point though they'd better be able to supply the channel for a long while.

[CK_1985]

I agree with the review that on balance, the NVIDIA card just shades it over the ATI. However, I reckon the real interest will be on how these two launches affect the price battle between the GTX260 and the 4870. Given that those cards are more than powerful enough for most people, if their prices fall even further I can see them stealing the thunder from these new boys.

Good review though guys

[sawyen]

Now thats for hoping the good old GTX260 216core price drops next week!

If it hits £130 I'll be the first one getting two of them!

[Main]

However, I reckon the real interest will be on how these two launches affect the price battle between the GTX260 and the 4870.

Exactly what I'm looking at You can get 1Gb 4870's with non-reference coolers for £155 already, so I'm going to be keeping an even closer eye on the prices now

[Irien]

You can get GTX260s (192 core) for 109 at ebuyer right now, or 119 at scan with bundle. 216s are 130 at overclockers.co.uk this week, and 139 at scan (again with bundle).

It's something of a dilema - one 275 or 4890 vs 2x 260s for 20-40ukp more...

(which feels wierd, as a bit of an ATI fanboy)

[matty-hodgson]

2* GTX260 (216s) are definitely FTW
even if i did pay a tad over £200 for each
i get paid tomorrow so i need some aftermarket coolers for them cos they're bloody loud

is it possible to just overclock a HD4870 to the HD4890 level?

[cobhc]

It's interesting comparing both the overclocked scores on both this review and the one on Guru3d. Seems to show that the GTX275 when overclocked beats out the GTX285, for about £100 less. Scan have the Palit 275 on preorder for just under £200 while the cheapest GTX 285 on scan is about £300. Looks like I'll be going for a GTX 275 and overclocking it, while saving half the money it would cost me to buy another and SLI.

[kalniel]

Looks like I'll be going for a GTX 275 and overclocking it, while saving half the money it would cost me to buy another and SLI.

If they have plenty of stock then that's definitely a good idea.

[Tarinder]

If they have plenty of stock then that's definitely a good idea.

But that could also be to do with the new R185 driver, which brings performance improvements.

We're sniffing around the major distributors and it seems as if there's a reasonable amount of GeForce GTX 275 stock. Scott will explain all in his look later on this afternoon.

[kalniel]

We're sniffing around the major distributors and it seems as if there's a reasonable amount of GeForce GTX 275 stock.

That doesn't seem to be the case in your article here:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=17900

Or do you mean that there is stock at the distis, but it's not reached retailers yet? Look forward to reading scotts article.

[dfour]

is it possible to just overclock a HD4870 to the HD4890 level?

It is possible but you would need to do either a hard or soft voltmod on it which would invalidate any warranty you had.

Good review. I was hoping that ATI had done enough to eek out the 275 maybe they can do it in the drivers.

I do think that Nvidia are going to have to do some price 're-aranging' though especially with there cards performance being so close together. Why pay £100 more for only 5-10% performance difference when a little overclocking will negate any difference???

[Tarinder]

That doesn't seem to be the case in your article here:

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=17900

Or do you mean that there is stock at the distis, but it's not reached retailers yet? Look forward to reading scotts article.

Yup, talking specifically about disties. Original article will be updated once Scott publishes his findings.

[bladerunner168]

I am running 2 280GTX (BFG OCX).

It would be interesting to see if these in SLI could match the performance of a pair of 280GTX's.

What do you folks think?

[Jimbo75]

These new Nvidia drivers are dodgy. On tomshardwareguide the gtx275 didnt pass Crysis at max resolution and died at 19x12. Why no Crysis benchmarks on this review today?

All in all, I think it's pretty unfair to compare this paper launched 275 with 'magic' drivers to a very real and available card in the 4890. You've fallen for Nvidia's well known dirty tricks and that is unbelievable for a website of Hexus quality. All you've done is take the thunder away from ATI and their real card, which is exactly what Nvidia wanted.

Congrats on having the worst two overclocking 4890's I've seen in any review so far btw.

[Tarinder]

These new Nvidia drivers are dodgy. On tomshardwareguide the gtx275 didnt pass Crysis at max resolution and died at 19x12. Why no Crysis benchmarks on this review today?

All in all, I think it's pretty unfair to compare this paper launched 275 with 'magic' drivers to a very real and available card in the 4890. You've fallen for Nvidia's well known dirty tricks and that is unbelievable for a website of Hexus quality. All you've done is take the thunder away from ATI and their real card, which is exactly what Nvidia wanted.

Congrats on having the worst two overclocking 4890's I've seen in any review so far btw.

Paper-launched? It's available to buy for £199 at Scan.co.uk. It's a very real card.
Dodgy drivers? We had one issue with Race Driver: GRID, but everything else ran fine.
Worst overclockers? We want to publish numbers that are solid, not pants-of-your-seat stuff, to give readers an honest indication of the overclocks they're likely to achieve. What happens if we quote 1,000/4,750MHz -a figure that lasts a second - and readers base their buying judgements on that?

The test drivers, 185.63, were used under the proviso that NVIDIA would release them to the public asap. NVIDIA claims that it will do just that, today, so we'll see where it stacks up.