Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB Sonic Dual Edition Video Card Review

Conclusion

In the past, we have seen pre-overclocked graphics cards blaze through tests their stock-clocked forefathers would have downright choked on. However, the never-ending question with these types of cards has always been whether they provide enough performance over reference-based products to justify their price premium. This leads us to what Palit is offering with their HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition and when you take a close look at its current pricing coupled with what amounts to blazing performance, it looks pretty convincing. What really began to sell us on this card was the fact that even through it has an aftermarket cooler, uses custom BIOS profile for increased clocks and sports a totally custom PCB, it still retails for less than the majority of stock HD 4870s. This bucks the trend of what we have come to expect from a factory overclocked card. We also like the fact that the heatsink is able to offer some very good cooling potential even with only one of its two fans running. Indeed, if this conclusion would end right here and now the Palit HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition would win accolades from us from sunup until sundown but that wasn’t meant to be.

There is no two ways about it; it seems like Palit tried to save money and play it safe in all the wrong places with this card. The Turbo switch looks cool but it seems redundant when you consider the “Turbo” mode offers very little in the way of real world performance benefits due to the lackluster core speed increase. Granted, the memory overclock seems to benefit framerates but not enough to really warrant a switch in order to enable it. This switch is also a perfect example of something money should never have been invested into, especially when something as basic as a Crossfire connector was excluded from the accessory package. Cutting out the basics in order to include a feature 99.9% of consumers will never use is a huge faux pas in our books. Luckily, for those of you who need a Crossfire connector, Palit’s customer support will help you out if you contact them.

Even though the heatsink on this card looks cool as hell, the love affair with it stops right there since it is too loud for its own good courtesy of an over enthusiastic 70mm fan. This one small item which probably costs less than a buck completely ruined our experience with a $300 graphics card and to make matters worse, this situation was entirely avoidable. All Palit needed to do was to wire both fans together onto a single 4-pin fan connector and have the whole shebang temperature controlled. As it is, the only way to avoid the obnoxious whine emitted by a 70mm fan running at 4000RPMs is to unplug its 2-pin connector. This isn’t an overly complicated process but it should never be necessary in the first place.

With a new PCB and a custom cooler, Palit gave themselves a blank canvas to work with but instead of painting a masterpiece, they made a great modern impressionist painting that is good but will never be as good as it should have been. That being said, the HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition is still a perfect card for those of you who want a well-priced HD 4870 and are willing to live with the noise it produces or simply unplug a single fan cable.


Pros:

- Great Performance
- Amazing price
- Looks great
- Shorter than a reference HD 4870


Cons:

- Loud
- Only one dual link DVI connector
- Dual slot cooler yet can’t exhaust hot air outside the case
- No Crossfire connector
- 2 year warranty

Thanks to Palit for sending us this graphcis card