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The HD 4890's continue to roll out of the factories! Today we will be looking at HD 4890 Vapor-X from Sapphire.

Right now, in the world of video cards, things are in a bit of a lull. A period of low activity. Sure, the first 40nm GPU came out in the HD 4770 two months ago, and NVIDIA last week unveiled a five new mobile GeForce parts, but still: it is a safe bet that NVIDIA and ATI are right now, working very hard on the final stages of the next generation of GPUs.

When will this new generation come out? It will probably be at least after the summer has ended. And until that new gen does arrive, the RV790 GPU is the quickest graphics chip that ATI is selling right now. Which is fine with us -- because the HD 4890 is easily fast enough to handle any PC game out there. Maybe we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves now, though.

We took a look at the HD 4870 Vapor-X from Sapphire, so today we'll take a look to see how much extra performance today's empowered model brings.  

The Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X is selling for around $240 USD, according to a few e-tailers we checked out. $240 is about average, as it seems HD 4890's are selling between $200 and $250 these days. HD 4870's on the other hand, have plummeted in price, and are selling as low as around $130. On the NVIDIA side of things, this would put this video card up against GTX 280's, overclocked second version GTX 260 cards (216 shader models), and to a lesser extent, the often more expensive GTX 275. 

Is the Sapphire HD 4890 Vapor-X able to handle the competition?