ATI Radeon 4890
Entertainment, Hardware No Comments »
For the past several years I have used mainly Nvidia graphics cards when building my home computers. Originally, I was an "ATI guy", but at some point Nvidia seemed to take the lead and I found I had less issues using their cards than ATI models. This was probably four years ago.
Times change. Apparently, ATI has made a huge comeback after being purchased by AMD... and it shows. What change my mind? A coworker told me that he was in the same boat but decided to go with ATI when his built his most recent machine since the cost to performance ratio was better.

After taking a look at what he proposed, a 1Gb Radeon 4890, as an upgrade to my 512Mb Nvidia 8800 GT I said sure why not. I went to Fry's (instant gratification much?) and bought one after work. There was only one... maybe it is the overly strange shape of the box that is attracting people? It only took about 20 minutes to install... mainly due to having to shuffle around the internal wiring coming from my power supply. The card requires two 6-pin or 8-pin power connections instead of the 1 my last card needed and I had pushed the wire I didn't need in an awkward place out of the way in my case.
The ATI Catalyst software seems to have been revamped and improved greatly. Setting up my dual monitors was a breeze and everything integrated perfectly into Windows 7. My FPS in WoW went from 60 to 140 (outside Dalaran). An incredible improvement.




