AMD has yet again stepped up excitement and anticipation surrounding a product-launch. This time, it's the company's fastest GPU: the RV790, whose single-GPU product, the Radeon HD 4890, is dressing up to go to office between April 6~8 worldwide. Taiwanese tech community website XFastest went found that volumes of the card by AMD partner Gigabyte have already reached a certain store.

The Gigabyte Radeon HD 4890 1 GB (model: GV-R489-1GH-B) is based on AMD's reference design, which has been pictured earlier, and whose early 3DMark performance figures have began surfacing. The card, features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory, which now seems to be the standard amount of memory on the reference design card. The unboxed card has been pictured from a good angle, which gives us a better indication of its length. It is longer than the HD 4870. Another scoop we can bring to you, is that from the first picture of the RV790 GPU that was published by DailyTech, it has been observed that the die is slightly larger than that of the RV770. What makes it larger is not known at this point in time.

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ZOTAC International, an award-winning manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today expands its GeForce 9800GT product lineup with the new more power-efficient ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco. The new ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco delivers phenomenal performance and breathtaking visuals with 40-percent greater power efficiency for a high-performance graphics experience that is easy on the power bill.

“Our mainstream ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT has won many awards for its performance. With the new ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco, you can have the competitive performance of the GeForce 9800GT series but with 40-percent greater power efficiency,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.

The ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco packs a performance punch with its 112 stream processors and high-speed GDDR3 memory technology. A wide 256-bit memory interface joins the screaming-fast stream processors with the high-speed GDDR3 memory for smooth frame rates and vivid visuals.

NVIDIA CUDA, PhysX and PureVideo HD technologies take the ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco beyond gaming graphics to enhance everyday tasks and applications such as video and image editing, video processing, gaming and video playback.

“We’ve come to a crossroads with graphics technology where we can use our graphics cards to accelerate non-3D applications. With this power, PCs are able to use the graphics cards to speed up image and video editing and transcoding to achieve better results than a quad-core CPU, calculate realistic physics effects, and playback high-definition video with greater image quality than most standalone players,” Mr. Berger added.

ZOTAC is confident in the long-reliability of the GeForce 9800GT Eco and backs it with an extended warranty for trouble-free ownership. It’s time to play with the more power-efficient ZOTAC GeForce 9800GT Eco.

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Weeks ahead of launch, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator has already started to to get listed on online stores, not concentrated in a particular region. The HD 4890 is characterized by the upcoming RV790 graphics processor, it is a current-generation successor to the HD 4870 accelerator. Its specifications are unclear, though most sources in the industry and press have so far revealed it not to be much of a featureset expansion over the RV770.

Dutch retailer Salland Automatisering BV has listed the Sapphire-made accelerator for € 253.95 inclusive of VAT (€ 218.95 excluding it). Another retailer, PB Technologies Auckland (New Zealand), has listed it for NZ $613.97 (325 USD), including applicable taxes. The Dutch retailer went on to list some of the card's specifications. It features 1 GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 3.90 GHz. Its core is clocked at 850 MHz. No pictures, or information about the GPU's internals (such as stream processor count, TMU/ROP counts) were provided. Both retailers have put the product on pre-order. AMD is expected to release the card on April 8, 2009.

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AMD is on the course of releasing a new line of high performance products based on its upcoming RV790 graphics processor. The high-end single GPU SKU, Radeon HD 4890 is expected to be competitive with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 (216 SP). NVIDIA on the other end of the field, is planning a retaliation to the RV790. The GPU giant is carving out a new SKU based on the 55 nm G200b: GeForce GTX 275.
The new SKU will be placed in the US $225~275 range. While the specifications are not known at this point in time, there are two theories: G200b with 216 stream processors and 512-bit memory interface, and the other theory suggesting 240 stream processors with the existing 448-bit memory interface on GTX 260. The latter looks inexpensive as the former would step up manufacturing costs due to the addition of two memory chips.

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As the price-war between the two graphics processor giants intensifies, ATI is reportedly preparing yet another price-cut for the Radeon HD 4870 1 GB graphics accelerator. The company had implemented significant reductions in prices of HD 4800 series accelerators as recently as in the first week of March.

The older price-cut placed the HD 4870 1 GB at the US $199 price point. Following NVIDIA's move to push the GeForce GTX 260 to that price-point, ATI's response is indicated to be a further $20 cut, sending the price down to $179. There is no word on when the new pricing would be implemented.

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ATI pada bulan April nanti akan meluncurkan RV790 (Radeon HD4890) yang merupakan seri penerus chip grafis terlaris tahun 2008 lalu yaitu ATI RV770 (Radeon HD4870).
Namun tampaknya RV790 tak lain hanyalah RV770 yang berjalan di kecepatan lebih tinggi saja. ATI hanya sedikit melakukan perombakan design pada arsitektur RV770 agar dapat menjalankannya pada kecepatan yang lebih tinggi.
Sample produk RV790 yang telah dibuat memiliki GPU yang berjalan pada kecepatan 850MHz dan menggunkan memory Qimonda IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X yang mampu berjalan di 1GHz, namun hanya dijalankan pada kecepatan 975MHz.
Meski sempat dikabarkan bakal memiliki Stream Processor sebanyak 960SP dan 48 TMU, namun ternyata GPU pada sample produk RV790 masih memiliki jumlah Stream Processor yang sama seperti pendahulunya, yaitu 800SP dan dibekali 40 TMU dan 16 ROP.
Memory interface yang digunakan juga masih sama seperti RV770 yaitu 256-bit dan mendukung memory GDDR5, GDDR4, dan GDDR3. Proses produksi RV790 juga masih 55nm seperti halnya RV770 dan juga masih dibuat di TSMC, dan belum dikerjakan sendiri di pabrik AMD.
Dengan clock speed yang lebih tinggi ketimbang Radeon HD4870, Radeons HD4890 diharapkan memiliki kinerja 20% lebih tinggi ketimbang pendahulunya tersebut. Kinerja Radeon HD 4890 akan mengimbangi Geforce GTX285, namun harga jual Radeon HD4890 akan jauh lebih murah yaitu berkisar $200-$250.

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Intel Q8200 Processor Overclocking

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.With stock BIOS settings, the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 runs with a 333MHz bus speed and a 7x multiplier that is used to reach the final core clock of 2.33GHz. As you can see above, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard FSB runs at 333.9MHz, so right out of the box the FSB is ~1MHz higher than stock settings. Let's start off by overclocking without adjusting any voltages to see what the Q8200 quad-core processor can do out of the box.The ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard BIOS is very simple to use and to see what the processor could do with default settings we just had to increase the 'FSB Frequency' setting from 333MHz to 400MHz. Just by making this one adjustment the board really picks up some speed and you can feel it when using applications. With this setting you can also increase the memory frequency up to 1600MHz as seen in the BIOS picture above.

By leaving all the settings in the BIOS on 'auto' we increased the FSB speed to 400MHz and the system was rock solid. By increasing the FSB to 400MHz we could now run the DDR3 memory at 1600MHz versus the previous speed of 1333MHz. It also allowed for the overall clock frequency to increase from 2.33GHz to 2.8GHz. Not bad for leaving everything in the BIOS on 'Auto' other than the Front Side Bus Frequency! With the voltage still set to auto we kept increasing the FSB until the board became unstable. We were able to reach 430MHz FSB before things started to get unstable. By increasing the voltage to 1.31V we were able to reach a FSB to 450MHz with ease. At this speed you can now run the DDR3 memory at 1800MHz, which provides some additional bandwidth for those wanting more. At 450MHz FSB we were running at 3.15GHz, which is starting to look impressive.
It was possible to reach a bus speed of 475MHz, but we had to run the processor at 1.350V in order for the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 to be able to reach these speeds. This rounds up to being a 1GHz overclock, which very nice for a processor that costs just $169.99 at online retailers. Overclocking varies from processor to processor and will void your warranty, so no complaints on this nice speed boost. If you are looking for a simple way to boost performance changing the FSB from 333MHz to 400MHz is the quick and easy overclock and for those wanting more you can increase voltages and reach well over 3GHz like we did. The Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor seemed to hit a wall above 475MHz as nothing was stable even when putting 1.4-1.5V through the processor with water cooling, so if you hit a point where nothing boots or is stable you have likely hit a wall or are being limited by the motherboard or memory kit. We have had this memory kit and motherboard well beyond these settings, so we know for certain that the processor has reached its limit.
When it comes to benchmarks, the overclocked Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 was a monster.

From : http://www.legitreviews.com/article/896/13/

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