AMD ATI Radeon HD 4890 Comments

Nice review Ed. Any news on when you'll have a GTX 275 review, most places only seem to have reviews of the 4890 up and not the GTX 275, even though they're both on sale and in stock at the moment.

As for the benchmarks, did you test the 192 or 216 SP version of the GTX 260, and the 512MB or 1GB version of the 4870? Also, there's a bit of a mistake in the table - you list the number of stream processors for the GTX 260 as 182, unless that's a version I don't know about? ;)

@smc8788 - Thats because Nvidia was originally supposed to launch the GTX 275 around the 13th, they have brought it forward to take some of the attention off ATI. Nobody seems to have had any time to review them because the decision was taken at the last second, it isn't expected there will be significant stock of them available for a couple of weeks.

I think the high end 40nm cards are worth waiting for personally, nothing revolutionary enough here to tempt me from my HD3870 :)

will these scores change depending on the review of the gtx 275? also how does it compare to the gtx 280?

On the one hand I sympathise with the difficulty of getting all the elements of a comparative review lined up, but plenty of other review sites had 4890 versus GTX 275 ready on Day One.

But, as pointed out already, you've ended up comparing ATI's brand-new 4890 against the *old* model of the GTX260. Comparing it against the newer GTX260-216 would have been bad enough, but this is just totally meaningless. You conclude that a GBP 230 card performs a lot better than an old GBP 150 card. Amazing!

You really should have sat on this and done a proper comparison against the GTX 275. Or if you simply HAD to get something out, you should have done a non-comparison overview of the ATI and then followed up with the comparative review.

Last gripe (sorry): you say you'll do some overclocking tests when you've got the GTX 275. Meaningless. Fun, but meaningless. You surely know as well as I do that overclockability is a crap-shoot where one card of model X overclocks this much, but another identical model X overclocks to a totally different degree. The only overclocking it's worth reporting in a review is if it is guaranteed and under-written by the manufacturer (as does happen with some cards) Unless you can overclock say 20 randomly sourced versions of a card, the results from just one are not worth anything.

"...nothing revolutionary enough here to tempt me from my HD3870 :)"
"You do realise even the HD 4870 is significantly faster than the HD 3870?"

...not only faster...series 3 should be avoided.

So, whats better; HD 4870 or HD 4890?

Actually, you can reduce the memory clock manually at idle with CCC. It reduces the idle power by about 30 watts.