Legit Video Card Reviews

GeForce GTX 275 Versus Radeon HD 4890 Video Card Battle

Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Product: GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890
Date: Thu, Jul 30, 2009 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Power Consumption and Final Thoughts

For testing power consumption, we took our test system and plugged it into a Seasonic Power Angel. For idle numbers, we allowed the system to idle on the desktop for 15 minutes and took the reading. For load numbers we measured the peak wattage used by the system while running the OpenGL benchmark FurMark 1.7.0 at 1920x1200 resolution.

Total System Power Consumption Results

Power Consumption Results: The Radeon HD 4890 1GB uses more power than a GeForce GTX 275 at idle, but less at load. The GeForce GTX 275 with its 240 stream processors really likes to gobble up power at load as the system peaked out at 378W during benchmarking. The idle state on the GeForce GTX 275 is very impressive though as the system dropped below 180 Watts. 

Radeon HD 4890 versus GeForce GTX 275

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

This article included the performance analysis of the video games Velvet Assassin and Wall-E, along with the OpenGL benchmark FurMark. I feel it's always good to switch things up and to go out and buy a couple games every now and again to see how video card performance is on games that the driver team really hasn't spent much time on optimizing. The results of the three new benchmarks showed that the GeForce GTX 275 was the more powerful video card between the two models I took a closer look at here today.

When it comes to price, the GeForce GTX 275 with 896MB of GDDR3 memory can be found for $209.99 shipped. The ASUS Radeon HD 4890 Graphics Card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory that we used in the review runs $239.00 shipped, but other brands like XFX use the the same reference design can be picked up for $195.39 shipped. There is basically a $15 price difference between the two cards, with the Radeon HD 4890 being less expensive.  This makes sense as the GeForce GTX 275 appears to be the stronger card on the five benchmarks I looked at today and the six that I looked at back in April during our launch coverage. 

Both of these graphics cards are very impressive and at a resolution of 1920x1200 neither fail to disappoint.  The bang for your buck that you get at the $200 price point is really impressive and is more than enough for the majority of gamers out there.  Don't forget, you can overclock for a little extra performance if you wanted to as both of these cards have some room in them to be overclocked.

Legit Bottom Line: The GeForce GTX 275 and Radeon HD 4890 are two great graphics cards even when trying to play a couple odd ball games that most people don't use to benchmark.

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Review Index
Page 1 - Testing With New Drivers and New Games
Page 2 - The Test System
Page 3 - Velvet Assassin
Page 4 - Wall-E
Page 5 - Tom Clancy: H.A.W.X.
Page 6 - FurMark 1.7.0
Page 7 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 8 - Power Consumption and Final Thoughts