Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB

The last few months has seen an absolute barrage of different HD4890 SKUs.  A lot of this has to do with the absolute insane amount of overclocking headroom evident in the RV790 design.  This headroom, which scales very well with extra power, allows for many different models to fill in the gaps.  A look at Sapphire's website shows an amazing seven different models for the 4890 alone!  Today, we look at one of these models, the HD4890 Vapor-X 2GB edition.  What makes this particular model different, however, is not the clock speed of the core; as there are several Sapphire models that have a higher clock.  The real differentiation between this card and the other cards is the simple fact that it is equipped with 2GB of GDDR5, compared to the normal 1GB amount.  In fact, the Sapphire Vapor-X is the only HD4890 on the market that has been equipped with 2GB of memory.  Of course, whenever we see an advancement in memory size, we must ask if it is truly beneficial.  Is it?  Read on and find out!

Specifications:

• Factory overclocked at 870MHz

• Sapphire Patent Pending Black Diamond Choke

• Quite and Powerful Dual Slot Vapor-Chamber Cooler, Under 20 dbA in 2D Operation, under 30 dbA in 3D Operation before 85 degree.

• Solid Capacitors

• 2 GB of GDDR5 memory @ 1050MHz

• DirectX® 10.1 support

• 800 stream processing units

• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering

• Quad mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance

• PCI Express® 2.0 support

• Dynamic geometry acceleration

• Game physics processing capability

• ATI Avivo HD video and display technology

• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology2

• ATI Stream technology

Features:

• I/O Output: Display Port+HDMI+DL-DVI+VGA

• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface

• Dual Slot Vapor-X Cooler

• Native HDMI

• 7.1 Audio Channel Support