Until very recently, little information has been known for sure about the upcoming Radeon HD4890. The card, based on the new RV790 graphics core, was rumored to be 40nm for quite a while. Turns out the GPU will remain a 55nm part, but will sport significantly beefed up clock speeds.

We can now bring you a wealth of new official unofficial information about the card that you won’t find anywhere else. Reference clock speeds on the engine will be 850MHz, with the memory pushed to 975MHz. Though these speeds are already quite a bit above what we have experienced on the HD4870, two key optimizations have been made on the RV790 core to enhance the performance further.

The first of these changes is that the chip has been given a tune-up to tighten the clock loops and enhance the power distribution. The second change is that the chip can now operate on two distinct power planes; one for the 3D core and one for the memory controller. This provides for greater control of the voltages and allows the chip to run closer to its optimal range. The dual power plane design also means that there is a higher potential top-end frequency and lower idle power consumption, since there is more voltage control over the different parts of the ASIC.

As a result, overclocking potential is off the charts. Reports have been flooding the net about this chip running at and in excess of 1GHz; a feat never before achieved with reference cooling solutions. Couple this with the fact that the memory can also be overclocked near 1.2GHz, and you have a very enthusiast-oriented card that should outperform even the most expensive competing products - and that’s not even the best part. According to our sources, you don’t need to go out and buy a factory-overclocked card to be able to reach 1GHz; mostly all cards based on the reference ATI design should be able to hit this milestone. Sweet.

Thanks to the very-handy OverDrive utility built in to the latest Catalyst drivers, the actual process of overclocking is very simple.

Lastly, the launch date for the card, previously reported to be April 6th or April 9th, now appears to be April 2nd. This places it’s release a few important days ahead of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 275 (April 6th).

Looks like dominance in the discrete graphics market won’t be changing hands anytime soon.

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