Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB Review

ccokeman - July 24, 2009
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Testing:

Testing the HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB will consist of running the card through the OverclockersClub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks to test the performance of the Matrix against many popular competitors to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where Physx will be disabled in the nVidia control panel. Clock speeds on each card are left at the as delivered speeds. I will test the HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB at both stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available when you choose to overclock the cards.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64bit
Case: Thermaltake Armor +

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB 950/1200

When it came down to overclocking the Vapor-X 2gb 4890 I just went for the clock speeds the 1GB model delivered and the 2GB model fell just a bit shorter than the 1GB model at 950MHz on the core but did a little better on the memory with a bump to 1200MHz. This really cut the time I needed to spend finding the limits of this card. Usually though I take a more measured approach by running up 10 to 20MHz at a time then testing to make sure I have stability and keep pushing until the card is not stable and then backing it down by 10MHz.