AMD Overclocks ATI Radeon HD 4890 Graphics Past 1 GHz

Although gamers have been overclocking their graphics cards for years, AMD is now offering the ATI Radeon HD 4890 with a world's first: a 1 GHz clock speed.

High-end gamers have been ratcheting up the cycles on their graphics cards for years, hoping to eake out more frame rates in games so they can dominate LAN parties and (of course) win their contents fair and square. Now, chipmaker AMD is getting in on the act, offering the world’s first 1 GHz graphics card in the form of a jacked-up ATI Radeon HD 4890. Unlike home-cranked graphics cards, the Radeon HD 4890 actually comes with a warranty—and, somewhat surprisingly, the unit is still air-cooled.

“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said AMD product group senior VP Rick Bergman, in a statement. “The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL.”

The Radeon HD 4890 uses GDDRS 5 memory and offers up 1.6 TeraFLOPS of computing power, pushing the realism of advanced physics and rendering to new levels. The card occupies a single PCI Express 2.0 ×16 slot and offers HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA output, and sports 800 stream processing units with support for up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle and up to 128 textures per pixel, OpenGL support, and (of course) support for ATI’s CrossFireX Multi-GPU technology so gamers can push their displays with up to four GPUs.

AMD hasn’t announced pricing for the 1 GHS RAdeon HD 4890 or specific partners who will offer the card, but expect folks like Asus, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GigaByte, MSI, Sapphire Technology, XFX, and others to offer the unit.