Legit Reviews

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Versus ATI Radeon HD 4890

AMD and NVIDIA usually do not launch graphics cards on the same day, but today is a new day and that is exactly what has happened. AMD is announcing the Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, which is powered RV790 GPU and arch rival NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce GTX 275 graphics card.

Both the Radeon HD 4890 and the GeForce GTX 275 are great graphics cards that are clearly better than the previous generation cards that they have replaced. The price versus performance value is high on both of these cards and for someone that has ~$250 to spend you'll find that you can't go wrong with either card.

Article Title: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Versus ATI Radeon HD 4890
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/944/1/
DIGG: http://digg.com/hardware/NVIDIA_GeForce ... 0_New_GPUS

I'm relly curious about where GTX 280/285 fits there. You have a couple of tests, It would be great to have some comparision (not only in 3dmark) charts.

Calamar wrote:

I'm relly curious about where GTX 280/285 fits there. You have a couple of tests, It would be great to have some comparison (not only in 3dmark) charts.

It would be great to have all the cards in there, but please keep in mind that Legit Reviews is run by only one full time staffer and we pump out six reviews a week. It takes exactly on average two hours per card to run this six benchmark suite and I average three runs, so that is six hours per card. Add in the fact that many of the games are tested with FRAPS and you have a situation where you can't run a series of scripts. Over 40 hours of work went into what you are seeing here today and I wish more cards were in the chart, it just wasn't possible due to time constraints. NVIDIA gave me access to the 185.65 drivers the day before launch and I was running the March 31st RC2 beta drivers for ATI... I promise you no other launch day review used either of those drivers. Rather than bring you a bunch of worthless numbers, I took the other road and brought you less cards, but with newer drivers.

Thanks for the review, it's nice to see some strong competition. Btw, I noticed one discrepancy which you should be able to clear up. In the chart (pictured above) you have 4890 OC @ 990/1090, but you had ATi Overdrive clock it up to 990/1190. So did you bump down the memory speed or is the chart wrong? Not to nit-pick, but was curious.

gwolfman wrote:Thanks for the review, it's nice to see some strong competition. Btw, I noticed one discrepancy which you should be able to clear up. In the chart (pictured above) you have 4890 OC @ 990/1090, but you had ATi Overdrive clock it up to 990/1190. So did you bump down the memory speed or is the chart wrong? Not to nit-pick, but was curious.

That would be a 2am in the morning typo... it was 990/1190 like the AutoTune overclock shows! Thanks for catching that.

Great amount of test cases. I was sold on the 4890, but the 275 looks pretty good. I do want a new graphics card, but I haven't determined any winner thanks to this review.

Very interesting, the GTX 275 wasn't even on my radar. I don't know if there is any room for it though, it is too close to the GTX 280. The HD4890 will be a winner in the benchmarking circles with those stock cooler/volt overclocks. Looking forward to benching one, maybe we'll see HD 2900XT speeds on LN2 If you have any spare time whip out Rivatuner and see if it'll go much higher.

Apoptosis wrote:

gwolfman wrote:Thanks for the review, it's nice to see some strong competition. Btw, I noticed one discrepancy which you should be able to clear up. In the chart (pictured above) you have 4890 OC @ 990/1090, but you had ATi Overdrive clock it up to 990/1190. So did you bump down the memory speed or is the chart wrong? Not to nit-pick, but was curious.

That would be a 2am in the morning typo... it was 990/1190 like the AutoTune overclock shows! Thanks for catching that.

Np, keep up the good work!

My question is, would my current 4870 reference GPU water block fit on the new reference 4890?????????????????

does it cover the capacitors on the 4870? The caps on the 4890 are much larger.

Im amazed how nvidia can make a line of products and then later add more to fill in the gaps

btw i don't think i have ever seen an nvidia card scale so well at quad SLI

It's simple really. Take the best you have and dumb it down to the level you need.