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Hardware Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Tim S, 26 May 2009.

  1. Tim S

    Tim S OG

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  2. kylew

    kylew What's a Dremel?

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    I hope this flops if they are going to go ahead with the expected price of £250 considering you can get XFX 4890s for £165 right now, I doubt there's almost £100's worth of benefit over the XFX card.
     
  3. Gremlin

    Gremlin What's a Dremel?

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    You always pay a premium for a top performing card or a top of the line anything really

    I think people have short memories and have been far too spoilt from the price wars resulting from the 4000 series cards, People will be in for a rude awakening next gen if they expect it to continue if one card signifigantly outperforms one another

    Either way prices will drop, other companies will push out their 1ghz models, but why wouldnt they charge a premium, its stupid to expect them not to
     
  4. [PUNK] crompers

    [PUNK] crompers Dremedial

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    looks like a great card to me, i picked up a GTX280 for £230 a coupla months ago and although im happy i kinda wish i'd waited a coupla months and picked up something less power hungry (although this doesnt seem to fit the bill)
     
  5. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    Wow.

    I know that cards like this command a price premium... but it makes me feel far less irritated about my 4870X2 dropping in price again the day it arrived. Especially since it was basically the same price as this is expected to be, and performs better for quite a few cases...

    Still, it's not a bad card. The idle temps are good. Load temps are a little warm but if it's quiet... ;)
     
  6. perplekks45

    perplekks45 LIKE AN ANIMAL!

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    Looks interesting until you see the price tag. Sad. £90 premium? Or... over 50%? No thank you.
     
  7. kylew

    kylew What's a Dremel?

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    A price premium yeah, but this isn't a premium. This is just a straight rip off. A price premium is say an increase in price relative to the difference in performance x 2. So it's 10% faster, 20% more as the absolute maximum of a premium. At the price point of £250 who is going to be a 4890 over a 4870X2? Especially considering you can get X2s for under £250?

    I completely understand your point of course, it's just this is above and beyond any reasonable premium.
     
  8. EnglishLion

    EnglishLion working for the good of mankind...

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    Price seems OK to me. Sure it's expensive but it is top of the range! I'd never buy one but then I don't tend to buy top of the range after all.

    People who have plenty of free flowing cash will buy these without question, hey why not get a few and run crossfire?
     
  9. earlydoors

    earlydoors Minimodder

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    I think you're paying for the (premium) overclocked core, the fact that it's the fastest single-GPU card ATI can offer (pretty competitive with the GTX285, too) and the quiet cooler, which - for ATI cards at least - is a rarity. Despite all this, though, I was hoping for a sub-£250 price point. I think £235 is acceptable. Although, anyone remember when the Toxic 4870 was announced? I think that was out for in excess of £250 at the start.

    Those load card power draw figures are making my eyes water, how much will this cost to run per year?!

    Does anyone have any idea as to when the 4890 will be released? I've been waiting for it a while - hoping to build a new i7 gaming rig around it in a month or so...
     
  10. xaser04

    xaser04 Ba Ba Ba BANANA!

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    Really struggling to see the point of this card when you can get the Asus HD4890 which has the voltage adjust (for 950+mhz on the core) for ~£80 less.....
     
  11. numanoid

    numanoid Modder

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    crossfire is a waste of money, as you dont get much umph from the 2nd card, i bought my saphire 4890 oc from scan last monrh £210, wish i hadn't, i should have hung on for a 4870x2 or the gtx 295, will they bring out a 4890x2 i wonder :thumb:
    take care all
     
  12. Baz

    Baz I work for Corsair

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    My spider sense says yes.
     
  13. dec

    dec [blank space]

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    someone should sell these for the price of a gtx260 just for one day. how far off the 1ghz speed is nvidia anyways? it doesnt seem like they have a need to get that fast as they can tack on a few more shaders but jw.
     
  14. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    But an X2 ALSO uses CrossFire?! It's the same drivers - two HD 4870s strapped to one PCB instead of two.
     
  15. kylew

    kylew What's a Dremel?

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    I'm pretty sure everyone would disagree with you there. There's now a large amount of games that scale at 80% to even 100% scaling above a single card. Who in their right mind would say that's not much?
     
  16. SlowMotionSuicide

    SlowMotionSuicide Come Hell or High Water

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    I'm grabbing the toxic version of this card, comes with 960Mhz core and 1050 Mhz memory overclocks and the same spiffy Vapor-X cooler, for 242 euros (around 212 GBP for u guys) :) Already on sale here in Finland it seems, as at least 4 webstores are giving 1-2 days for delivery.

    More info at http://www.sapphiretech.com/presentation/media/?psn=0004&articleID=2109
     
  17. [USRF]Obiwan

    [USRF]Obiwan What's a Dremel?

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    Instead of milking the poor old cows even more lets make a new design with a new GPU and release that already...

    Or not,since all the cards that are available now, are very capable of running the current line of games. And I don't see any futuristic 'DX12' game, that totally bottoms out the current generations of video cards. The truth is, that they want to sell cards even if everybody does have a current generation card in their PC. They lure you into a buy, by offering four frames per second increase in game performance.

    The problem is that the games do not have all the bells and whistles we wanted, remember the Ati and Nvidia demos. Where is all the eye candy, like rain fluidly running down a bump mapped wall (like Ati's toy shop), stained class windows magic, fires and smoke you walk into and it moves around you, the dynamic cloths, wavy hair and all that stuff our videocard can do.

    so where is it?
     
    Last edited: 26 May 2009
  18. Baz

    Baz I work for Corsair

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    Waiting for the consoles to catch up.
     
  19. thehippoz

    thehippoz What's a Dremel?

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    lol numa learning.. least he's building his own rigs- he'll get it eventually.. some people giving bad advice though like down in the gaming forum just saw someone post frame rate doesn't matter in fps gaming online- a new guy needs sound advice

    this 4890 looks awesome.. yeah obiwan- waitin on the next gen myself before I buy.. but if I had to buy today on a 24+ inch, this would be it
     
  20. StevieC

    StevieC Rising Fusion

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    *maniacal grin*

    Okay, now THIS begs the question: If I got my hands on the MSI 790FX-GD70, a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition, and a quartet of these in CrossFireX, plus waterblocks to cool the graphics, northbridge and southbridge, and phase-change cooling for the CPU, what kind of performance would result? and so what if I need this PSU and a pair of 220V outlets to run it?

    http://www.koolance.com/water-cooling/product_info.php?product_id=665

    :naughty:
     
    Last edited: 26 May 2009
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