The card
Vapor-X technology is Sapphire's in-house-designed cooling concept that's been demonstrated to perform better than the reference heatsink.
Sapphire has three iterations of custom card-cooling, encompassing the Vapor-X (non-overclocked), TOXIC (pre-overclocked), and ATOMIC (crème de la crème, overclocked). The ATOMIC ships with the swanky cooler and increases clock-speeds on all parameters.
Cranked up to 1,000MHz core and an effective 4,200MHz memory, the core, in particular, is impressive. Compare this with the ~965MHz we usually achieve when overclocking regular HD 4890 boards.
The chunky heatpipe-based cooler is also quieter than the reference heatsink.
Look closely enough and you will see that there are two separate heatsinks. The large one covers the GPU and memory, of course, and a smaller one, near the front of the card, keeps the voltage-regulation components from hitting too high a temperature.
Testing shows that the cooler is very quiet when running 2D - barely discernible over a quiet system - and rises to just a general hum when running full tilt. It's definitely quieter than the reference heatsink's fan and better-performing, as well.
Hmm. What's this? Sapphire's cajoled the Radeon HD 4890 core to 1GHz but has used extra voltage to do so, it seems. We reckon this is the case because the PCB features both an eight-pin and six-pin PCIe power connector. The reference card uses dual six-pin connectors.
But there's nothing untoward about the rear; it's the same as any other HD 4890's. Scoring 12,535 marks in 3DMark06 at 1,920x1,200 4xAA 16xAF there's no doubt it's going to be quick.
Summary, and bundle
Sapphire's Radeon HD 4890 ATOMIC is a suped-up version of the RV790 GPU. Clocking in at the highest core frequency we've seen from HD 4890, allied to a reasonable memory overclock, performance should be strong.
The bundle will comprise of the usual full-retail part, as found here, along with an HDMI cable and dongle.
