Last week, we covered the launch of the 4890 in-depth, but due to the quick turnaround time that is often associated with NDA's, we didn't have an opportunity to really push the overclocking aspect of the card.  Today, I aim to remedy this oversight, as I have in my grubby little hands, the latest 4890 from XFX.  It's not just any 4890 either, this is the top-end "XXX" edition, which comes in with clocks at 900MHz on the core and 975MHz for memory, making it one of the fastest 4890 SKUs available on the market today.  So what does the extra clock speed tell us?  Is it just another 4890 who has had the last drop squeezed out?  Or is there something special about this card?  Read on and find out!

Specifications:

The XFX HD 4890 XXX edition makes use of AMD's brand new RV790 core, which promises to deliver the features of the 4870, but with a much higher clock potential.  THe XXX edition aims to make the absolute most of that potential, boasting one of the highest clock speeds out of the box of any card on the market.  On top of that, the XXX edition is equipped with 1GB of high-bandwidth GDDR5, with enough bandwidth to kill a yak at a hundred yards....with mind bullets!

With the enhanced clock speeds of the XXX edition, GPU-z is reporting the following stats for the faster 4890:

XFX XXX HD4890 Process 55nm Transistors 959M Engine Clock 900 MHz Stream Processors 800 Texture Units 40 Texture Fillrate 36.0 GTexels/s ROPs 16 Pixel Fillrate 14.4 GPixels/s Memory Type GDDR5 Memory Clock 975 MHz Frame Buffer Size 1GB Memory Bus 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 124.8 GB/s

While the specifications are exciting, it's time to move onto the truly exciting part: the overclocking!