The Radeon HD 4290 is just an overclocked version of the Radeon HD 4200 as it operates at 700MHz. In other words, the Radeon HD 4290 is a Radeon HD 3300 with support for DX 10.1, which is a little underwhelming. Using the Radeon 4350 logic with its 80 shader processors would have been a more exciting prospect, but here is the problem: AMD has not shrunk the 890GX chipset and is still manufacturing using a 55nm design process. It is likely they’ve been unable to comfortably fit a more powerful graphics engine without a die shrink and therefore decided to give the Radeon HD 4290 a clock boost instead. We can expect a similar level of 3D performance from the 890GX as seen on the 790FX. Connectivity also remains essentially the same on the 890GX supporting VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. Again, what disappoints us the most is that the performance benchmark for IGPs will not be reset with the arrival of this new chipset.
