Introduction

Sapphire are certainly a name you will have seen over the years and have earned their place as one of the top ATI manufacturers in the business. They always go the extra mile with their models and often offer overclocked cards with custom cooling solutions.

Recently we tested the Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X which offers a slight improvement over the reference model with a modest overclock and a custom cooling solution. Today however we will be taking a look at the real powerhouse that Sapphire have on offer, the HD 4890 Atomic. This Atomic edition’s core is clocked at a mind numbing 1000MHz, a whole 150MHz increase over the reference model. This is an enormous boost for a factory overclock and it is supplied with a beefy Vapor-X cooling solution that unlike the Vapor-X model we looked at utilises heatpipes in a more elaborate design.

With the huge performance boost over the reference model it will be interesting to see how the card stacks up to Nvidia’s flagship single core offering, the GTX285.