ATI Radeon HD 4890 Roundup (ASUS, Diamond, HIS, Sapphire, XFX)

Included Software

Yes, we know that there are plenty of free programs out there which will help you overclock and monitor your graphics card. From Rivatuner to GPU-Z, they can be downloaded in a few clicks of the mouse and are regularly updated to support the latest and greatest hardware. In order to try and break into the GPU tuning scene, graphics card manufacturers are turning to their own proprietary software. We haven’t really focused much on what manufacturers offer but in this roundup we decided to take a look at the programs each of these companies distributes with their cards.

Unfortunately, ASUS is the only company in this roundup to have overclocking and monitoring software included with their card.


ASUS GamerOSD / SmartDoctor
System Resource Usage (GamerOSD): ~4.8MB
System Resource Usage (SmartDoc.): ~8.1MB


GamerOSD mainly consists of the functions you would normally find within a game monitoring program like FRAPS. It is exactly what the name suggests: an on-screen display for frames per second, GPU temperature and other information while you are gaming. You even have the option to record movies and take screenshots. All in all, this is a pretty interesting little program.


When you first start SmartDoctor, you are greeted with cluttered interface with all of the important settings compacted down at the bottom of the screen. The left side shows a somewhat pointless animation of a magnifying glass passing over your graphics card while the upper right hand portion of the screen gives you the fan speed setting (without the option to change it) and temperatures. The clock speed sliders are straightforward and you can easily set the core and memory speeds but we wish this section was given prominence.


The real meat to this program lies in the Advanced Settings pop-up. Here you can easily control a massive amount of options from fan speeds to temperature alarms to monitor settings. We wish the whole program would have been set up in this format instead of having the overclocking relegated to the bottom quarter of a convoluted interface.

Regardless of how much we hate the interface on this program, it does offer a good amount of options for overclocking and monitoring the health status of your graphics card.


For the ASUS HD 4890 TOP, this are slightly different because ASUS has advertised this card as a Votage Tweak edition which allows users to control the voltage for the GPU core. The voltage adjustment is above the standard clock speed sliders and allows adjustments up to 1.45V.