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

By Kenny Yeo - 19 Jun 2009

Temperature, Power Consumption and Overclocking

Temperature

The PCS cooling system by ZEROtherm certainly looks like it's up for the job and the temperature readings confirm that. Although the PowerColor PCS HD 4890 BF Edition was really hot to touch, it recorded a reading of 68 degrees Celsius, a healthy 5 degrees improvement over the reference cooler found on a regular Radeon HD 4890.

Power Consumption

Despite being manufactured using a 55nm process and altering the chip's power distribution pattern, the Radeon HD 4890 is still a power hungry card, and sadly, the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 BF Edition is no different. Also, it seems that the drivers in the Catalyst 9.5 package do little to alleviate the situation. The PowerColor card achieved a hefty 332W reading at load, which is significantly more than a Radeon HD 4870 and its direct competitor - the GeForce GTX 275.

Overclocking

While the Radeon HD 4890 might not be the coolest or most power efficient card to run, it is a very eager overclocker and with the PowerColor PCS+ HD 4890 BF Edition, we were able to achieve a maximum clock of 1020MHz at the core and 4400MHz DDR at the memory. These are certainly not numbers to sniff at and its 5535 3DMarks was a 20% improvement over a stock Radeon HD 4890 card's 4575 3DMarks.

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