With the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 selling for just $180 US in April when the Radeon HD 4890 was released, we found it hard to accept this new graphics card at $250 US. After all Radeon HD 4890 is in essence just an overclocked Radeon HD 4870 with far greater overclocking abilities. ATI fine-tuned the RV790 XT core allowing for incredible core frequencies.

Although the default core speed of 850MHz is a moderate bump over the 4870, many users are reporting overclocks in the order of 1GHz and beyond. Still despite the great overclocking abilities of the new Radeon HD 4890 we were not sold as the price premium was just too difficult to justify.

Furthermore Nvidia was able to swiftly counter the Radeon HD 4890 with what I considered at the time to be a better product, the GeForce GTX 275. As luck would have it, the GeForce GTX 275 was not just a quick and easy counter for the Radeon HD 4890, it was the perfect counter. Prior to the launch of these two cards the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 were already doing battle. The Radeon HD 4890 was meant to outclass both products and conquer the $250 price range but evidently that didn't go as planned.

Today however things are a little different as the Radeon HD 4890 is now a $200 US graphics card while remaining 4870 stock is priced at just $150. Therefore while the Radeon HD 4870 still remains the best value part in our opinion the Radeon HD 4890 is no longer the outcast we made it out to be. The Radeon HD 4890 actually offers gamers an impressive level of performance at $200, particularly if you plan to do a little overclocking.

In fact the particular Radeon HD 4890 graphics card that we are looking at today has been engineered with overclocking in mind. The new Radeon HD 4890 iCooler x4 (1GB) graphics card from HIS has been designed to allow users to achieve maximum overclocking potential from their RV790 XT GPU and as a result we received some pretty impressive results without much effort.