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Sapphire Toxic HD 4890 Review June 18, 2009 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With a beefier power subsystem, OC'ed clocks, and custom vapor chamber cooling, Sapphire's Toxic HD 4890 takes ATI's Radeon 4890 GPU to another level. In fact the card delivers performance rivaling the GTX 285 in some cases. But is it worth the price premium? Find out in today's review!
 Sapphire Toxic HD 4890 Review | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
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The GPU in question is ATI's recently released Radeon 4890. While it’s fundamentally based on the same architecture as the Radeon 4870 with 800 stream processors and 256-bit memory interface with GDDR5 memory, ATI has made a number of tweaks under the hood of the 4890’s RV790 GPU in order to enable higher clock speeds. Decoupling capacitors have been added in order to reduce signal noise at high clock speeds, while the GPU has been tweaked to consume slightly less power than its predecessor. Higher voltages also help the chip scale to higher frequencies, with ATI revamping the board’s power subsystem so it delivers more juice to the GPU. ATI also says they’ve retimed the entire chip to run at higher frequencies.
And enable high frequencies is exactly what they’ve done. The Radeon 4890 is clocked 100MHz higher than its predecessor – 850MHz. If you recall previous reviews of Radeon 4870 cards we’ve looked at over the last year, you’ll know that the 4870 generally topped out around 780-800MHz, and could really only go over that amount with specialty cards that offered the option of manual voltage adjustment. In comparison, the Radeon 4890 starts where only a select group of 4870 cards could be OC’ed to with a little bit of luck; and with a little bit of OC’ing, the 4890 scales much further from there – 1GHz is within reach with a quick slide of the mouse in Overdrive and some luck.
Or if you want something a little more certain, ATI’s board partners are brewing a crop of factory OC’ed 4890 cards that are fully backed by warranty. This has led to the clock speed war that we talked about.
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Sapphire is one of the principal combatants in this war. Considering their history of providing some of the fastest tricked-out Radeon cards on the market though, that probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to most of you. Their Toxic line of video cards are known for their mixture of high clock speeds with superior cooling.
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Sapphire’s got a new Toxic Edition card for the Radeon 4890 GPU, and as expected, Sapphire once again ups the ante by mixing factory OC’ed speeds with their exemplary vapor chamber cooling+heatpipes. Sounds intoxicating doesn’t it? The really sweet news is that’s not all Sapphire’s done with their latest Toxic board. Sapphire’s upped the card’s power subsystem as well. Let’s take a closer look shall we?
| Board analysis | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
The most obvious difference between ATI’s Radeon 4890 reference design and Sapphire’s Toxic HD4890 is the Toxic board’s cooler. Both cards utilize heatpipe cooling, but Sapphire takes it to another level with their Toxic cooler.
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At the heart of the Sapphire cooler is their vapor chamber cooling technology. We’ve written about this numerous times in the past, so we won’t rehash the detailed explanation of how the tech works here, but to make a long story short, vapor chamber cooling acts much like a heat pipe only it boasts lower thermal resistance than heat pipes, with higher heat conductivity as well. From the consumer’s point of view, Sapphire flattens their vapor chamber cooler into an ultra-thin chamber about the size of a conventional thermal plate. In fact, if you don’t look closely for the vapor chamber, you could easily confuse Sapphire’s cooling for a conventional heat plate.
Sapphire’s vapor chamber cooler is made completely from copper, which improves its ability to draw heat off the GPU thanks to copper’s superior thermal conductivity.
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Sapphire doesn’t stop there though. To help the vapor chamber do its job Sapphire also adds three heat pipes to further aid in GPU cooling. The heat pipes are rather long, you can literally see them poking out of the right side of the cooler, and are made from aluminum. If you recall, ATI’s Radeon 4890 reference cooler features three heat pipes as well, but they aren’t this large (although they are copper).
Cooling the heat pipes is a dual-slot aluminum heatsink. This heatsink is outfitted with dozens of long fins, which helps to increase the surface area of the heatsink. Finally, at the base of the heatsink is a large thermal plate. Its primary responsibility is cooling the board’s memory modules, although it also helps to dissipate heat off the PCB.
An additional heatsink is also used to cool the board’s power circuitry. This is also found on the 4890 reference design, but the heatsink Sapphire employs has much larger fins than the stock ATI cooler (the heatsink on the ATI reference design is restricted in height due to the card’s blower-style fan).
Sapphire finishes the GPU cooling off with a fan that’s nearly 90mm in size: that’s bigger than many case fans! By using such a large fan, Sapphire can keep everything cool without having to crank up the fan’s RPMs to unbearably high noise levels. At idle, the fan ran in the 1640-1690 RPM range, and peaked to just 1850 RPMs while running looped Crysis timedemo runs. This allowed the Toxic card to run whisper quiet in operation.
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Besides the beefed up cooling, the other hardware change Sapphire employs over the stock Radeon 4890 reference design is the use of an 8-pin power connector. Out back you’ll see that Sapphire employs one 6-pin PCIe power connector, and one 8-pin power connector. The 8-pin connector is capable of supplying the GPU with up to twice the power of a 6-pin connector, 150W versus 75W, so by integrating an 8-pin power connector instead of the second 6-pin connector, Sapphire is seriously upping the amount of juice that the card draws. In theory, this should improve your odds when OC’ing.
The 8-pin power connector is required in order for the board to operate; slapping a 6-pin PCIe connector in there isn’t enough. Thankfully Sapphire does include an 8-pin PCIe-to-Molex adapter.
In our testing with the card underclocked to run at Radeon 4890 speeds, the Toxic board consumed 21W more juice under load than the Radeon 4890 reference board under the same conditions: 314W for the Toxic vs the 4890’s 293W (idle consumption was within 1W).
The rest of the board’s design is the same as the stock Radeon 4890 reference board. Sapphire makes no changes to the board-level components, although they do utilize their trademark blue PCB rather than the red PCB ATI uses on their reference design.
Toxic clocks
Sapphire ups the clock speeds pretty significantly with their Toxic 4890. The graphics core is OC’ed 110MHz to 960MHz, an improvement of 11%. The board’s memory is also OC’ed, although not quite as dramatically, running at 1050MHz. This is 75MHz higher than the Radeon 4890’s 975MHz memory and equates to a 7% performance boost.
The other neat feature about the Sapphire Toxic 4890 card is that the card’s BIOS grants you higher maximums in Overdrive. Whereas the bone stock Radeon 4890 is limited to a maximum OC of 1.0GHz in Overdrive, with the Sapphire Toxic board installed you can crank the Overdrive slider up to 1.1GHz.
The memory slider can be dialed up an extra 100MHz too: while the stock Radeon 4890 is capped at 1200MHz memory, you can run the Toxic card’s memory up to 1300MHz.
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Accessories
Sapphire ships the Toxic HD 4890 with a healthy bundle of software and accessories. Included inside the card’s packaging is a fresh copy of 3DMark Vantage, PowerDVD 7 (6-channel edition), and CyberLink’s DVD Suite, which includes a range of different CyberLink programs.
Hardware accessories include the aforementioned 8-pin power connector, a 6-pin PCIe power connector, CrossFire cable, DVI and HDMI adapters, a component video cable, and composite video out.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
Intel Core i7-965
Gigabyte EX58-Extreme
6GB OCZ Reaper HPC DDR3-1600
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 216 core
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
ForceWare 186.08
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Toxic 1GB
Catalyst 9.6
300GB Western Digital Caviar SE
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/Service Pack 2
Benchmarks
Call of Duty 4
Crysis
STALKER: Clear Sky
Far Cry 2
Dawn of War 2
Fallout 3
| Performance | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
| Temps/Overclocking | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Overclocking
Considering the hardware underneath, we were eager to see how far we could push our Toxic HD 4890 board. Fortunately, the card didn’t disappoint, clocking in at 1030MHz core/1170MHz memory. We actually were able to clock the memory at speeds over 1.2GHz, but artifacts would creep in occasionally. We had to clock the memory all the way down to 1170MHz to get the artifacts to go away.
Our testbed would lockup in benchmarks if the graphics core exceeded speeds of 1030MHz, requiring a full reboot.
Temps
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Pros
Toxic clocks: As we’ve come to expect from Sapphire’s Toxic line of video cards, the Toxic HD 4890 ships with higher clocks than the reference Radeon 4890. The graphics core is OC’ed by 110MHz, running at 960MHz – just 40MHz shy of 1GHz we might add – while the memory is clocked at 1050MHz, 75MHz over stock.
These speeds are higher than most of the other factory OC’ed 4890 cards that have hit the market so far. The other 4890 boards range in speeds from 875-925MHz, with only PowerColor coming close at 950MHz.
The only board that’s hit US retailers clocked higher than the Toxic 4890 is Sapphire’s own Radeon 4890 Atomic board. The Atomic is Sapphire’s flagship offering, sporting a 1GHz core clock and 1050MHz memory. Of course, the Atomic is also $50 more expensive than the Toxic, so you’re paying a pretty considerable premium for that extra 40MHz: over $1 per MHz over the Toxic’s $250 price tag on Newegg.
In terms of performance, the OC’ed clock speeds allowed the Sapphire Toxic HD 4890 to run 7-9% faster than the stock Radeon 4890 in our benchmarks. This was actually enough to push the Toxic 4890 card ahead of our bone stock GeForce GTX 285 in a few of our benchmarks.
Vapor-X Cooling: Sapphire equips the Toxic HD 4890 with one of the most powerful air coolers out there for the Radeon 4890. Not only does the card sport a copper vapor chamber cooler, Sapphire adds three heatpipes on top of that for added cooling. The card is then finished off with a larger heatsink for the VRM circuitry than the cooler employed on the reference Radeon 4890, and a large 90mm cooling fan.
The fan does an excellent job of supplying the heatsink and heatpipes with cool air, and generates very little noise.
Compared to the stock Radeon 4890 cooler most of ATI’s board partners employ on their Radeon 4890 cards, the Toxic HD 4890 ran 5 degrees Celsius cooler at load and 12 degrees cooler at idle. We’re actually positive the card could’ve generated even lower load temps if we’d employed Overdrive’s manual fan control feature, as the default fan profile only cranked the fan up by a little over 200 RPMs. Even with our ear right next to the card we couldn’t hear any difference between the card idling at the Windows desktop versus load, and our Extech sound level meter wasn’t sensitive enough to get a consistent reading either.
Extra Power: While ATI’s reference specifications only call for two 6-pin PCIe power connectors, Sapphire has decided to employ an 8-pin power connector+6-pin connector for the Toxic HD 4890. The 8-pin connector provides up to twice the power of a conventional 6-pin connector, so the board does draw more power, but this in turn opens the door for higher clocks.
Price: Currently Sapphire’s Toxic HD 4890 is selling for $250 on Newegg. That’s a $50 price premium over their Radeon 4890 board based on ATI’s reference board design. Is the Toxic card worth the extra $50? Most definitely.
A premium VGA cooler like the one Sapphire provides on their Toxic board will set you back at least $40 alone on Newegg, and many of the best VGA coolers approach the $60 price point.
On top of that, the Toxic board is factory OC’ed and ships with a more robust 8-pin power connector.
Cons
No voltage adjustment: An increasing number of video cards are shipping with software utilities that support GPU/memory voltage adjustment. ASUS’ 4890 Voltage Tweak is the most common example among 4890 cards.
With a little more voltage we’re pretty confident we could’ve pushed the card even further when OC’ing.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
FiringSquad says:
As usual, there are dozens of cards out there sporting the basic ATI reference design, but there are also a healthy number of reference-based cards on the market sporting OC’ed clocks. Sapphire, Diamond, HIS, MSI, and XFX are among a host of 4890 manufacturers who fall in this category. These Radeon 4890 cards are certainly nice, but real hardware enthusiasts crave better cooling than what ATI provides. This is where Sapphire steps in with their Toxic HD 4890.
At the heart of the Toxic HD 4890 is its vapor chamber cooler. The vapor chamber is made from copper and is directly responsible for drawing heat off the RV790 GPU. From there Sapphire relies on three large heatpipes. The heatpipes give the vapor chamber cooler an added boost of cooling, much like a second turbocharger can be added to an engine to enhance its performance. A dual slot heatsink and large fan then round out the package, helping to keep these critical cooling components as cool as possible so they can perform their job better.
The OC’ed clock speeds are also nice, but what really pushes the Toxic board over the top in our minds is the addition of the 8-pin PCIe power connector. The beefier power connector supplies the card with more juice than the standard 6-pin power connector, helping to ensure stability at high clock speeds.
We just wish Sapphire provided a utility with the card that supported volt modding. Considering the cooling this board sports and the beefier power connector, the hardware itself is certainly capable of taking advantage of it. This is a growing trend that other manufacturers are beginning to implement on their latest Radeon cards, so we’d like to see Sapphire hop onboard as well.
This is the Toxic card’s only real weakness.
Sapphire’s done it again though. In our opinion the Toxic HD 4890 blends the perfect fusion of price, OC’ing, and cooling all into one package.
Sure, there are Radeon 4890 cards that are clocked higher than the Toxic, but they cost significantly more too. Sapphire’s Atomic board for instance is clocked 4% faster than the Toxic, yet it’s priced 15% higher than the Toxic 4890. Is the slightly higher clock speed and fancier packaging worth it? For some people perhaps, but to us, no.
The Toxic HD 4890 is physically the exact same card, only with a BIOS that’s been programmed with slower clocks. Save your money and opt for the Toxic. You won’t be disappointed.