Initial impressions of Gigabyte 4890 OC

sparky13

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Oct 1, 2009
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Well I will eventually be upgrading my monitor from a 19 to something larger so I figured a GPU upgrade would be in my future and I was cruising ebay when I came across a Gigabyte 4890 OC for a fantastic price. I won the auction and installed it today. This is replacing my XFX GTS 250. My only gripe with the GTS 250 was it's Dyson-like fan noise that would crank up whenever I would start gaming and would continue until I messed with it in Rivatuner. WAY too loud for my tastes. I can tolerate some noise but this thing was just rediculous at anything above 60% fan speed. Anyways, what a difference this Gigabyte model made! It has a nice Zalman cooler w/some massive heatpipes and a quiet fan affixed to the GPU and comes factory OC'd to 900 mhz. I tried it out with HL 2: E2 and Resident Evil 5 to check out it's performance and monitor temps w/the fan set at 50% via ATI Overdrive. I am happy to report that it is almost inaudible over my 4 120mm Antec tricool fans that are installed in my Antec 300 case. I had to put my head near the case to check that what I was indeed hearing was the GPU and not the case fans or PSU. Temps during gaming never got above 63 C which I do believe is impressive for a 4890 (they generally run quite hot correct?) and at idle it runs @ only 36-39 C. HL 2 ran at a hilarious 120-250 fps maxed out and RE 5 ran between 80-120 fps w/16CQ applied. I knew this was to be expected due to the lower resolution but still quite an improvement over the GTS 250. I was also a bit worried about the size of the card but it fits nicely in my case, I didn't have to re-arrange anything. It's also worth mentioning that since it eschews (sp?) the molded plastic housing of the refernce card it fits in a single expansion slot. Always a plus in my book. While a bit longer it takes up considerable less space than the GTS 250 it's replacing did.

I would summarize that if you're looking for a 4890 that is already overclocked and runs cool and quiet, go for the Gigabyte model. I'll happily answer anyone's questions if you want! Thanks for reading.

-Sparky13


System:
Antec 300 case w/4 120mm tricool fans
AMD Phenom II 720 BE OC'd to 3.5 @ 1.44
Gigabyte MA48GM-US2H mATX motherboard
Coolermaster Hyper 250 cpu cooler
6 GB Patriot Viper DDR2 800
Gigabyte HD 4890 OC 1GB GPU
LG 22X DVD/CD burner
WD 260 GB Caviar black HDD


 

brockh

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Oct 5, 2007
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I think that's fairly average, but good find anyway. At manual 50-60% fan speed my Sapphire Vapor-X idles around 40 C and under load around 60 C while playing Left4Dead, Risen, NFS: Shift. It's a bit hotter while running Crysis, and a bit cooler when running Half-Life 2. I play at 1920x1080 and the card is manually overclocked at 900 MHz core and 1075 memory. I paid ~$150 for it with a NewEgg combo.

I have the same processor (only stock cooling @ 3.2) and case without the front fans.
 

sparky13

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Oct 1, 2009
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Interesting, I thought that the 4800 series ran much hotter. Puts my mind at ease. Not a fan of things running too hot!