Date:
Monday , August 03, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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ASUS EAH4890 TOP Video Card

Based on the Radeon HD 4890 GPU, the new ASUS EAH4890 TOP has numerous improvements over the reference design, including a new cooling solution and improved power circuitry. We compare it against a reference Radeon HD 4890 and a GeForce GTX 275 in the latest games including Call of Juarez Bound in Blood, Ghostbusters, and Demigod.

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System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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We are using Windows 7 x64 RC Build 7100 for this evaluation. For the ASUS EAH4890 TOP and the ATI Radeon HD 4890 we have Catalyst 9.6 WHQL driver installed. We have the ForceWare 186.18 Beta driver installed for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275.

Below is the GPU-Z screenshot of the ASUS EAH4890 TOP after we installed the drivers

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Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home . Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.