Final Words & Verdict
The PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 PCS+ is truly a lovely card. Though hard to find in etail, if you browse around a little you'll spot it for roughly 239 USD, and that is a fair price for a product of this caliber. The one deficit I have to report is the noise level of the ZEROtherm cooler. Though it functions fine and the cooling performance is good as well, we do find it slightly on the noisy side. This happens a lot with PowerColor products and their custom coolers as it seems. Somehow that is not considered a priority or something they weigh in very much. It's a bit of a shame as this separates them from the competition. Would the PCS+ cooler have been silent, then this would have been the alpha dog among the Radeon HD 4890 series.
Noise level aside, in every other way the card is of course delicious. You'll have games rendered in the best quality at very nice framerates, and face it .. that's what it is all about. This card is clocked 100 MHz faster compared to the reference based 4890 and really, that's quite something. Combined with the slightly faster memory as well that again gives this product a boost forward with a 10 to 15% performance gain. And when you accumulate things and compare to the Radeon HD 4870 .. that's now a 25~30% faster product. So we are not looking at a lame 10% performance increase over the last-gen ASIC, no Sir .. this is a proper speed improvement.
Next to all the gaming loving, you can of course use the graphics card to enhance and accelerate your High-Definition movies as well thanks to the built in Universal Video Decoder, though bare in mind you will need a 3rd party application like PowerDVD to utilize that function.
So there you have it. If you can live with a little noise coming from the cooler during hefty frag sessions, then it won't get a lot better than this. Awesome image quality, excellent performance in the high-end range and all that priced at roughly 239 USD. As such the PowerColor Radeon HD 4890 PCS+ definitely comes recommended. Oh and hey .. PowerColor throws in a free copy of Battle Forge as well.
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