This week the Radeon HD 4890 was released and as our reference article showed, it has a lot of overclocking potential, really it has a lot of headroom there which could results in 10% better performance on average. Typically overclocking can be managed really well through the Catalyst Control Center, however .. the Control Center always has certain restriction as in 'how much' you can actually overclock.

In this article we'll show you how you can overclock the easy way, with the help of Rivatuner, followed with a couple of performance results as well.

As many of us know, computers, and their related hardware, have been getting smaller and smaller over the years. Peripherals and add-ons are no exception, of course. Laptop mice have become a niche all their own, desired for their small size and portability. So too, have the USB thumb drives. Leading the charge when it comes to miniaturizing is Super Talent, with their Pico line of USB drives. The Pico has been around for some time now, but the 16GB generation is a relative newcomer.

The Pico-C (the one being tested here today) is the smallest of the small drives. It has no cap, no sliding cover, just an eyelet at the end. Worried about damaging it? Don't. This thing is rugged, water-resistant and even feels solid. This is not some flimsy little plastic drive, it's metal and it's durable. Good thing it's tiny, lack of extra material goes a long way to keep the weight down.

G.Skill offers a full range of tri-channel memory kits at speeds of up to 2000 MHz. We are taking a look at their red kit rated at 1600 MHz and CL9. Even though this memory is on the lower end of the line-up, it manages to surprise with good overclockablity and the possibility of tighter timings.

RiData released a line of SSD drives called the Ultra-S Plus. This series of drives was announced at CES this year, (how did I miss that booth?) and they claim it is much faster than many of the other MLC drives available today.

It looks like nVidia brought a gun to a knife fight when you compare the performance of the latest cards from both ATI and nVidia. The GTX 275 just outperformed the HD 4890 at every turn, with the exception being Crysis Warhead where the GTX 275 was beaten in all four resolutions. In the GTX 275 you have what equates to half of a GTX 295. You get the 240 shader processor cores of the GTX280/285 with the memory subsystem from the GTX 260. Surprisingly, this combination offers exceptional performance across just about every game tested with this card. In fact, out of 36 tests run, the GTX 275 outright won the resolution in 30 out of 36 tests and was equal to or better than the HD 4890 in 32 out of 36 tests. Pretty much a big win for the GTX 275. The cooling on the GTX 275 is the reference cooler from nVidia. It does an admirable job of keeping the big GT200 core relatively cool when the drivers are controlling the cooling with load temperatures of 88 degrees Celsius under load. Turn the fan speeds up and you are welcomed with some noise to let you know the fan is there but it isn't nearly as loud as the ATI cooling solution. When the fan is spooled up the load temperatures take a drop down to 64 degrees Celsius.

AMD and NVIDIA usually do not launch graphics cards on the same day, but today is a new day and that is exactly what has happened. AMD is announcing the Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, which is powered RV790 GPU and arch rival NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce GTX 275 graphics card.