Late last week AMD announced to the press that it is planning on releasing an HD 4890X2. The HD 4890 X2 will essentially be two regular HD 4890 GPUs running on one graphics card, much like AMD’s own HD 4870 X2 or Nvidia’s GTX 295.
The HD 4890 became available internationally earlier this month, and is slowly trickling its way onto local shelves. It is now the fastest single GPU ATi graphics card available, and competes closely with Nvidia’s recently released GTX 275, trading blows at different resolutions.
Early benchmarks have revealed that two HD 4890s running in Crossfire are able to offer similar and sometimes superior performance to Nvidia’s GTX 295, which makes use of two GPUs and is currently billed as the most powerful single card graphics solution available.
Previously AMD denied any plans to release an X2 version of the HD 4890, stating that there is no real need for such a product in the current market. According to Tomshardware however, AMD has now selected manufacturing partners and is set to go ahead with the design.
The regular HD 4890 is a power hungry graphics card, requiring up to 190W in order to run at its full potential. This means that the HD 4890 will almost certainly become the most demanding graphics card ever built in terms of power consumption.
The potential prospect of two GPUs running at up to 1000MHz on one board is a daunting one, especially for the likes of Nvidia, and it remains to be seen how this monster will match up to Nvidia’s king of the high-end hill. Our prediction is that the HD 4890 X2 will offer slightly less performance than the GTX 295, but will be slightly cheaper, arguably offering better value for money. This will almost certainly lead to price cuts from Nvidia, so enthusiasts may have something to look forward to.
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