Since I first saw the box, I was really liking this graphics card. Up until then, all I had seen was the nVidia card boxes which are really more of a tech-like theme than this. Along with the box came with any and all accessories needed to get full use of this card including HDMI-out, sound over HDMI, Crossfire capabilities, and much more.

 

Throughout the testing of this card, it was apparent that it could run everything I threw at it, including Crysis and Crysis: Warhead, at the resolution of 1900x1200 with at least 30FPS or better. Remember, 30FPS and below is the point at which you are going to start seeing the Microsoft Power Point slide show effect. In other words, you are going to notice the game lagging. The good news is that the card didn't even hit the 30FPS mark.

 

Overall performance of the card was great. Temperatures at idle and load were very acceptable with and without the card overclocked.The only thing that was really disappointing was the ratio between loudness and fan speed. The fan gets exponentially louder just by slightly increasing the speed. Although, 45% did seem to be about the perfect mixture of speed and sound and came within 2C of having the fan at 75%.

 

The Diamond HD4890 XOC can be purchased from New Egg for only $254.99, which seems very reasonable considering all the performance that's packed into this beast. That's half the cost of a 4870x2 and half the price of what a GTX280 was when it was first the dominating nVidia card.