How pleased is AMD? So pleased. Pleased enough with its video card accomplishments to issue a press release—and pretty product shots!—about its 1 gigahertz ATI Radeon HD 4890. There's just a slight catch.
The new ATI Radeon HD 4890 GPU does get to say "First!" to reach those speeds straight from the factory, but AMD does note that processor is overclocked, running at a higher speed than it was originally designed for. (In the 4890's case, the standard speed was 850 megahertz.)
But in AMD's defense, it is using plain old air-cooling techniques to keep the card from having a meltdown, not some fancy liquid-cooled solution that some aftermarket providers offer and PC modders go for. And look how pretty it is! All red and fancy!
So good on you, AMD. You've got the FLOPS to back it up. All we need now are seven sample cards. Wait, make that eight.