XFX ATI Radeon HD 4890 XXX Edition Video Card Review :: Card

Side shot

Fan

XFX artwork

Fan power

The XFX card uses the reference cooler that has been around from ATI since the launch of the HD 4870 last year. Their logo and sticker covers the reference heatsink. There is a 47 fin fan on the rear of the PCB. The card itself is about 9 inches long with the cooler covering almost the entire length, save for an inch or so on the rear for the power connectors for the fan and video card to be situated.

Rear of PCB

Rear of fan

6-pin power

LEDs

There are two 6-pin power connectors on the card, just like the HD 4870 cards. This ensures that people without 8-pin power connectors can use this card without an adapter or buying a new power supply. The rear of the PCB has numerous circuitry, the GPU back plate and four LEDs which light up when the card is in need of power.

Crossfire bridges

patent

Top

PCI Express 2.0 connector

The top of the card has two CrossfireX bridges to connect to other HD 4890 cards to improve performance in games when one than one card is installed. Note to run in CrossfireX mode with four HD 4890s would require 8 6-pin power cords! The card is a second generation PCI Express card meaning that it can have up to 5Gigabits/second transfer rate between the motherboard and video card.

Stickers

Length View

Heatpipe

IO

The rear IO of the card is identical to that of every other video card on the market that has this configuration including two Dual Link DVI outputs, and a HDTV output. You can attach a HDMI output or a VGA output with adapters, meaning that two Digital DVI monitors, two HDMI monitors, or two CRT monitors can be attached to the card.