DX10 Comes Up
With DirectX 10, games place a little more pressure on GPUs. This is clearly evident in our DX10 based titles. The results pulled from our benchmark of Crysis produced results so close to each other as to not really matter.
World in Conflict didn’t faire much better, posting exactly the same results in our lower resolution tests. There was a spike in performance when we cranked up the resolutions, and it once again scaled with the minor jump in GPU speed. This is good as it shows the performance of this card is slightly better then stock.
Besides a minor, very minor, bump in frame rates between the bone stock vanilla version and this card, the benefits lie in the fact that the card is extremely good at not adding to the noise levels of our test system. This is very similar to the opinion we had with the review of the totally passive GIGABYTE Silent Cell HD 4850 card: Silent, but not that deadly.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The GIGABYTE GV-R489OC-1GD Radeon HD 4890 video card seems to be a bucket of contradictions. It’s a performance card that is silent. It has a huge aftermarket cooler but can’t really overclock. Did I mention the silent part? Oh right, that’s the major benefit of this card.
Idle or load, this card wasn’t any louder then the ambient noise coming from our test rig. This gives the card an interesting benefit, in that it can pull double duty in a gaming rig or quiet PC. The extra ports give it a certain bit of future-proofing, and make it a tantalizing video card to insert into a home theatre PC.
I’d actually have a hard time finding anything wrong with the R489OC. GIGABYTE is pricing the card aggressively, and it’s quite versatile. It would be nice to see the RAM at least passively cooled, but at least it runs in spec. The added benefit of a factory overclock does add some performance.
Taking a quick browse at Newegg.com, we see that as of the publishing of this article the GV-R489OC-1GD is going for $209.99 USD. This is only $10 or $20 more then the most basic of Radeon HD 4890 cards, making it welcome addition to any number of different personal computer configurations.
Pros
- Low price
- Cooler both silent and efficient
- Stable factory overeclock
- Lots of output options
Cons
- RAM not cooled
- Not much more overclocking headroom
Overall Rating: 9.0 / 10.0
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