GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890 Round-Up


Introduction

The PC world was treated to one of those rare occurrences a few weeks back--a 1-2 punch into the 3D graphics fray from both ATI and NVIDIA. We're talking about the near simultaneous launches of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275. Both of their names lead to obvious suggestions about where they fit into their respective families.

With the Radeon HD 4890, one might assume that there was an update made to the venerable HD 4870, and for the most part that assumption would be correct.  Both GPUs share the same number of shader processors, texture units, and ROPs, bit with three million more transistors than the RV770, and hence a larger die, clearly something else was at work here. As most of you probably know by now, the Radeon HD 4890 is based on a new GPU dubbed the RV790 and that the additional transistors along with the inclusion of a decap ring that reduces electromagnetic interference gave AMD the ability to raise clock speeds over the 4870 by about 100MHz, give or take a few MHz depending on the model.

Also, as its name suggests, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 275 fits comfortably into the slot between the GTX 260 and GTX 285 cards, with a price set to match the HD 4890.  All three of these cards are powered, for the most part, by NVIDIA's GT200b GPU, but are equipped with varying number of stream processors, different amounts of memory, and differing memory interface widths and ROP configurations.  At its most basic level, the GTX 275 is a lower power version of the GTX 285, using the same 55nm die at a clock speed of 633MHz while the GTX 285 runs at 648MHz.

With some of the background now covered, we take a look at seven cards, three Radeon HD 4890s and four GeForce GTX 275s, from some of the most prominent names out there.  Which one of these cards deserves your hard-earned dough?  Read on and find out...
 

 Card

 Core Clock

Shader Clock 

 Memory Type and Capacity

 Memory Clock

 Memory Bandwidth

Radeon HD 4890

Diamond Radeon HD 4890 XOC
Diamond Radeon HD 4890 XOC
Current Street Price: $269
 

 925 MHz

 N/A

 1GB GDDR5

1050 MHz    

 134.4 GB/s

HIS Radeon HD 4890 Turbo
HIS Radeon HD 4890 Turbo 
Current Street Price: $230
 

900 MHz

N/A

1GB GDDR5

1000 MHz

128.0 GB/s

XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme
XFX Radeon HD 4890 Extreme
Current Street Price: $248
 

875 MHz

N/A

1GB GDDR5

975 MHz

124.8 GB/s

GeForce GTX 275

ASUS ENGTX275
ASUS ENGTX275 
Current Street Price: $268

633 MHz

 1404 MHz

 896MB GDDR3

1134 MHz

127.0 GB/s

EVGA GeForce GTX 275 1792MB
EVGA GeForce GTX 275
Current Street Price: $292
 

633 MHz

1404 MHz

 1792MB GDDR3 

1134 MHz

127.0 GB/s

Gigabyte GV-N275UD-896H
Gigabyte GV-N275UD-896H
Current Street Price: $248
 

633 MHz

1404 MHz

 896MB GDDR3

1200 MHz

134.4 GB/s

MSI N275GTX Twin Frozr OC
MSI N275GTX Twin Frozr OC
Current Street Price: $244
 

666 MHz 

1476 MHz

 896MB GDDR3

1161 MHz

130.0 GB/s 


Now, there's much more to these cards than the basic specifications that we've shown you here.  The chart above is there to show the major difference between the cards, mostly in regards to GPU and memory clock speeds as well as the amounts of memory installed and their respective memory bandwidth.  For a more complete rundown of either the RV790 or GT200b architectures, we recommend checking out some of our previous articles including the launch pieces on both the HD 4890 and GTX 275:

With all that reading out of the way, we're set to take a look at our first cards based on ATI's RV790.


Related content