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

Sapphire HD 4890 1GB Atomic

Manufacturer Product Page: Sapphire Atomic HD 4890
Product Number: 100269ATL
Warranty: 2 years
Price: $300 USD / $350 CAD


The Atomic is the Big Boy of their lineup so Sapphire took their exterior packaging to the next level. The whole exterior box is covered in a silver, highly reflective finish that can and will blind you if you carry it outside on a sunny say. Within this exterior box is a plain cardboard box which holds the card and accessories.


The secondary box opens up to reveal a well protected card along with an additional, flatter box at the bottom. This contains a glut of accessories including:

- Cyberlink Power DVD
- Cyberlink DVD Suite
- 3DMark Vantage (Full version)
- HDMI Cable
- TV-Out adaptor
- Component Video Out cable
- Crossfire connector
- DVI to VGA adaptor
- DVI to HDMI dongle
- Molex to 6-pin power cable
- Molex to 8-pin power cable
- Quick install guide
- Sapphire case sticker

Seriously, there isn’t anything else you could ask for?


After going through all of the reference-based cards in this roundup, the Atomic proved to be a breath of fresh air. It has a unique dual slot cooler design with a single large fan right in the middle. The downside to this design is that for all its cool looks, it still exhausts a fair bit of hot air into your case.

Even though the Atomic is a custom Sapphire design, it maintains the 9.5” overall length of the reference HD 4890.


The heatsink Sapphire chose uses their proprietary Vapor-X technology which we covered here Sapphire HD3870 512MB TOXIC Edition Review and uses a quartet of large heatpipes to move heat aware from the core. In addition, the heatsink uses a full coverage contact plate that touches the ram modules and VRMs. This ensures that every component on this card is properly cooled.


Since the Atomic runs at some extremely high clock speeds, Sapphire built in a little insurance when it came to power connectors. Instead of the usual dual 6-pin connectors found on a reference HD 4890, we now have a single 6-pin and an 8-pin connector.