At $250 the Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X 2GBruns about $40 more than the vanilla version, but also sports twice the memory as well as a nice improved cooler.   That cooler has allowed Sapphire to raise the core GPU speed by 20MHz to 870MHz and the memory by 100MHz to 1050MHz and is capable of hitting 950MHz and 1200MHz with a little tweaking.  In addition, the cooler is significantly quieter than the stock fan.  See what the extra gigabyte of GDDR5 does for performance at OCC.

“So what does the Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB do well? Well, for one it offers up excellent cooling without the noise penalty that the reference cards present when you push the fan speed toward the max level. This card was barely audible three feet away from the case and was not heard over the white noise in my test room. The temperatures delivered by this card are almost identical to those of the Vapor-X 1GB card I tested. With the clock speeds at the factory default 870/1050 settings and the fan controlled by the driver, I measured 48 degrees Celsius at idle and 75 degrees Celsius while under load. Much lower than the reference cooling, and again it is dead silent in this configuration. Once overclocked and bumping the fan speed to 100%, I measure 43 Celsius at idle and 70 Celsius under load. Both better than the driver controlled numbers at the default clocks and leaps and bounds ahead of the reference cards. Having run through a few HD 4890 cards, the limits are relatively easy to reach without resorting to BIOS or hardware tweaks. The 1GB model reached 970MHz on the core and 1195MHz on the memory. The 2GB model reached very similar clock speeds of 950MHz on the core and 1200MHz on the memory, no slouch in the overclocking department even with the additional memory. That looks like some pretty close binning.”

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