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

Heat & Acoustics

For all temperature testing, the cards were placed on an open test bench with a single 120mm 1200RPM fan placed ~8” away from the heatsink. The ambient temperature was kept at a constant 22°C (+/- 0.5°C). If the ambient temperatures rose above 23°C at any time throughout the test, all benchmarking was stopped. For this test we use the 3DMark Batch Size test at it highest triangle count with 4xAA and 16xAF enabled and looped it for one hour to determine the peak load temperature as measured by GPU-Z.

For Idle tests, we let the system idle at the Vista desktop for 15 minutes and recorded the peak temperature.


Overall, the HD 4890 is a loud card. Some manufacturers (Diamond and HIS) represented here today took it upon themselves to add a bit less aggressive fan speed profile which resulted in slightly higher temperatures but even these minor changes didn’t help things much. The stock cooler on the HD 4890 relies on brute force fan speed to keep its temperatures within check rather than a well designed heatsink assembly. This is a shame since many of us value peace and quiet when we are gaming and in this, the newest ATI card is an absolute failure. We recommend setting the fan speed to a constant 40% and living with higher temperatures if noise is an issue for you.

Sapphire on the other hand has harnessed the power of their Vapor-X technology to design a heatsink that manages to cool off the highest-clocked core of the group to downright impressive levels. Add to this the fact that the fan is barely a whisper over the noise of even a Yate Loon 120mm 1200RPM case fan and we are definitely happy that one board partner could put two and two together.