I was thinking of getting a 4890 Radeon video card for my PC?

I have a 4850 in there now. My questions are;



1. Would I get much of a performance gain?



2. Is there anything different about the 4890 that might make it incompatible with my PC? Is the card much larger, or does it require a different connection than the 4850?|||The 4890s are a similar size to the 4850/4870, as more are produced then size range will grow as well (think silent coolers, CrossfireX configuration etc).



To be honest why would you want to upgrade now? 4890s have only been out a little while, give it a few more months for the price to drop a bit and some better variations to be made available to the general public.



The speed difference and performance improvement is around 15% over the 4850 but for the cost its not worth it yet.



the 48XX series of cards are rocking and AMD are rightfully proud of them, they are just a bit price heavy at the moment.



Remember getting a better graphics card is not always the answer especially if you have bottlenecks elsewhere in your system (such as RAM or processor).|||The question you should ask yourself before upgrading is: Is this necessary? Did you recently purchase a new game or a new monitor with a very high resolution and are you now noticing low framerates which adversely affect your ability to game?



If not, then stick with the 4850 until you do feel it's necessary to upgrade. This way you save money and end up with a better upgrade when the time comes.



If you do feel it's time to upgrade, then the 4890 could be a good choice. Although I feel the 4870 is a better value in terms of performance per dollar. Still, the 4870 may not be a big enough upgrade to warrant the cost over the 4850 you have currently. You may even want to go higher than the 4890, depending upon your budget.



Or just wait until prices come down or a new product is released - the HD5800s should be coming along later this year with support for DX11, and engineering samples of the 40nm process are already out. So there are some nice potential upgrades on the horizon.|||There will be a performance gain but probably not enough to warrant the cost of the new card. If you can you'd get a lot better performance doing a CrossFire setup with a second 4850. Otherwise just wait until the next generation of cards come out.|||They require the same connection which is a Pcie x16 slot. 1.0 or 2.0



If you have the 512mb 4850, then you will see a notable ability to run higher graphical settings.