AMD recently officially announced and boasted about its "new" Radeon HD 4890 graphics circuit that was the first ever to ship at 1GHz clock frequency from factory, although overclocked. We have now witnessed several manufacturers announce overclocked models with 1GHz clock frequency, and more and more point out that 1GHz really is the limit of what Radeon HD 4890 can do without any major physical modifications and extreme cooling.
Earlier on Hexus took a closer look at the card and now ATI-forum.de has done the same with Sapphire HD4890 Atomic and its overclocking tests show how thin the margin is. ATI-forum.de managed to get to 1020MHz and 1015MHz respectively through additional overclocking.
Even if we couldn't help giggle at PowerColor when it launched the PCS++ models with a GPU clock of 1010MHz it has become quite clear that these small frequency increments require a lot of work.
As TSMC, which makes the AMD HD4890 circuits, optimizes its manufacturing process the margins should improve, but there is no doubt that AMD has taken a risk by officially announcing 1GHz versions of Radeon HD 4890, but we would assume the marketing guys had a lot to do with this.
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Radeon HD 4890 at 1GHz is really pushing it ...
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