PowerColor Liquid Cooled Radeon HD 4890 LCS
Our Test System and 3DMark Vantage
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: In order to provide comparable results, each graphics card was installed on the same, high end test system. The components we used consisted of an EVGA X58 Classified motherboard, Core i7 965 Extreme processor, and 6GB of Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory. Within the BIOS, we configured the processor and memory to their rated specifications of 3.2GHz and 1600MHz respectively. The Western Digital Velociraptor hard drive was formatted before installing a clean copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1. Once the installation was completed, we fully updated the OS and installed the latest drivers and applications relevant to the test system.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 DirectX March 2009 Redist RivaTuner v2.24 ATI Catalyst Control Center ATI Catalyst Display Driver 9.4 NVIDIA GeForce Drive 185.87 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark Vantage v1.0.1 FarCry 2 Crysis* Left 4 Dead* * - Custom benchmark |
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The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1200, with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
Obviously not a match against the dual GPU offerings, the PowerColor HD 4890 LCS is competitive compared to the GTX 285 videocard. The 4890 comes win 1,000 points and 3 frames per second of NVIDIA's fastest single GPU product. In addition, the overclocked core and memory speeds show improvement over reference settings.
