Leave it to the Pros - PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 Battle Forge Edition

Conclusion

A Solid Offering

Like they did with the Radeon HD 4870, PowerColor is once again one of the first to release a Radeon HD 4890 with a custom cooler solution. For a card that generates as much heat as the Radeon HD 4890, the ZEROtherm PCS cooler does a fairly good job. Furthermore, it is one of the more stylish looking coolers, with a simple understated design that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

Price-wise, the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 BF Edition should retail for around S$419, which makes it only about S$20 more than a regular Radeon HD 4890. And we think that this S$20 premium is totally justifiable. Of course, you can expect more Radeon HD 4890 with custom coolers to appear on the market, but how many will be able to match PowerColor's pricing? Furthermore, you can opt for the regular PCS+ HD 4890 without the bundled Battle Forge game, and that would be even more affordable.

To sum up, the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 BF Edition is a very capable card. It offers decent performance and its cooler does the job. What we don't like, however, is that the cooler isn't that much less noisy than the reference model, and also the high power consumption figures (which is to be expected since it's overclocked). Even so, it is still one of the better Radeon HD 4890 cards around, and is definitely great value for money if your heart's set on a Radeon HD 4890.

Still, we should not neglect the competition. Bear in mind here that the results of the GeForce GTX 275 in our reporting was done using beta drivers. We suspect the newly released 185.85 drivers may address some of the issues (temperature and power consumption) that plagued the GeForce GTX 275 in our original review and also improve on its performance, but without a card in our labs to re-test, we can only speculate at the moment. We'll update those results in due time.

What we know for sure however, is that the GeForce GTX 275 is in the same price range as the Radeon HD 4890 and it certainly has the performance to match. If you throw in NVIDIA's support for PhysX and CUDA, the GeForce GTX 275 suddenly looks like great value for money too. To conclude, it looks like the battle between the forces of green and red is not one that can be easily resolved this round.